Culture and Social Behavior

Culture and Social Behavior The Ontario Symposium, Volume 10 ONTARIO SYMPOSIUM ON PERSONALITY AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY E...

Author: Richard M. Sorrentino | Dov Cohen | James M. Olson | Mark P. Zanna

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Culture and Social Behavior The Ontario Symposium, Volume 10

ONTARIO SYMPOSIUM ON PERSONALITY AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY E. T. fflGGINS, C. P. HERMAN, M. P. ZANNA, EDS. Social Cognition: The Ontario Symposium, Volume 1 M. P. ZANNA, E. T. HIGGINS, C. P., HERMAN, EDS. Consistency in Social Behavior: The Ontario Symposium, Volume 2 C. P. HERMAN, M. P. ZANNA, E. T. HIGGINS, EDS. Physical Appearance, Stigma, and Social Behavior: The Ontario Symposium, Volume 3 J. M. OLSON, C. P. HERMAN, M. P. ZANNA, EDS. Relative Deprivation and Social Comparison: The Ontario Symposium, Volume 4 M. P. ZANNA, J. M. OLSON, C. P., HERMAN, EDS. Social Influence: The Ontario Symposium, Volume 5 J. M. OLSON, M. P. ZANNA, EDS. Self-Inference Processes: The Ontario Symposium, Volume 6 M. P. ZANNA, J. M. OLSON, EDS. The Psychology of Prejudice: The Ontario Symposium, Volume 7 C. V. SELIGMAN, J. M. OLSON, M. P. ZANNA, EDS. The Psychology of Values: The Ontario Symposium, Volume 8 S. J. SPENCER, S. FEIN, M. P. ZANNA, J. M. OLSON, EDS. Motivated Social Perception: The Ontario Symposium, Volume 9

Culture and Social Behavior The Ontario Symposium, Volume 10

Edited by

Richard M. Sorrentino University of Western Ontario Dov Cohen University of Illinois James M. Olson University of Western Ontario Mark P. Zanna University of Waterloo

2005

LAWRENCE ERLBAUM ASSOCIATES, PUBLISHERS Mahwah, New Jersey London

The camera copy for the text of this book was supplied by the editors.

Copyright © 2005 by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by photostat, microform, retrieval system, or any other means, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., Publishers 10 Industrial Avenue Mahwah, New Jersey 07430

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ontario Symposium on Personality and Social Psychology (10* : 2002 : University of Western Ontario) Culture and social behavior / edited by Richard M. Sorrentino ... [et al.]. p. cm. — (The Ontario symposium; v. 10) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8058-4787-1 (alk. Paper) 1. Social psychology. 2. Culture. 3. Cross-cultural studies. 4. East and West. I. Sorrentino, Richard M. II. Title. III. Series. HM1033.O88 2004 302-dc22

2004053198 Books published by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates as printed on acid-free paper, and their bindings are chosen for strength and durability. Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

Preface Chapter 1 Two Dimensions of Political Attitudes and Their Individual Difference Correlates: A Cross-Cultural Perspective

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Michael C. Ashton, Henry A. Danso, Gregory R. Maio, Victoria M. Esses, Michael H. Bond and Doris Keung

Chapter! A Cultural-Psychological Model for Explaining Differences in Social Behavior: Positioning the Belief Construct

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Michael Harris Bond

Chapter 3 Insider and Outsider Perspectives on the Self and Social World Dov Cohen andEtsuko Hoshino-Browne

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Chapter 4 Culture and Relationships: The Downside of Self-Contained Individualism

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Kenneth L. Dion and Karen K. Dion

Chapter 5 Constructing Good Selves in Japan and North America Steven J. Heine

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Contents Chapter 6

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Culture and Lay Theories of Change Li-Jun Ji

Chapter 7 Interdependent Agency: An Alternative System for Action Shinobu Kitayama and Yukiko Uchida

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Chapter 8 Language, Culture, and Conceptions of the Self

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Wei Qi Elaine Perunovic, Michael Ross and Anne E. Wilson

Chapter 9 Uncertainty Orientation and Social Behavior: Individual Differences Within and Across Cultures

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Richard M. Sorrentino, Yasunao Otsubo, Satoru Yasunaga, John Nezlek, Sadafusa Kouhara and Paul Shuper

Chapter 10 Issues in Individualism and Collectivism Research

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Harry C. Triandis

Chapter 11 The Dialectical Self: Contradiction, Change, and Holism in the East Asian Self-Concept

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Julie Spencer-Rodgers and Kaiping Peng

Chapter 12 The Ghosts of Cultural Psychology Richard E. Nisbett Author Index

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Preface The 10th Ontario Symposium on Personality and Social Psychology was held at the University of Western Ontario, June 21st to 23rd, 2002. The topic of the symposium was culture and social behavior, and the presentations covered a wide variety of issues in this area. As has become the fortunate custom of Ontario Symposia, the papers generated many interesting discussions among participants, as well as many productive interchanges with the approximately 100 additional audience members (20-25 faculty and 50-55 graduate students). Surprisingly, this included several students and psychologists from North America and around the world. The current volume consists of the expanded and updated versions of papers presented initially at the conference. The span of time between the conference and the publication of the book is the result of the practice of giving the authors an opportunity to revise their papers based on, among other things, feedback obtained from other participants and audience members at the conference. Also, as has become customary, contributors, as well as the editors, provided comments on preliminary drafts of other participants' chapters—an undertaking for which we, as editors, are grateful. Over the past decade, social psychological research in East Asian countries has blossomed and many scholars in Japan, China, and other countries publish regularly in the best journals in the field. Much of this research activity has been directed toward testing the generalizability of theories and findings from North American psychology to the eastern context. Numerous consequential differences have been identified. For example, western cultures tend to emphasize individuality in their socialization processes, whereas eastern cultures tend to emphasize the collectivity (connections to others and to groups). These cross-cultural differences have many important implications for social identity, social cognition, and interpersonal behavior. Though much of the research in this volume will discuss East-West cultural differences and similarities, contributors also focus on how this East-West research can help us in cross-cultural studies more generally. The chapters in this book cover a range of topics from differences in basic cognitive processes (for example, Ji) to broad level cultural syndromes that pervade social arrangements, laws, and public representations (for example, Triandis, Kitayama). Methodologically, the conference also features a range of perspectives. Pioneers in the field of cross-cultural psychology such as Harry Triandis and Michael Bond present their work, along with those who represent some newer approaches to the study of culture. For example, researchers like Shinobu Kitayama and Steve Heine are cultural psychologists whose tools and approaches to understanding culture are different from those of cross-cultural psychologists. (Briefly and as an oversimplification, cross-cultural psychologists

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are generally interested in the etic aspects of culture and look for a small set of universal dimensions on which cultures can vary. Cultural psychologists, on the other hand, generally are more interested in the emic aspects of culture, trying to flesh out various patterns in social practices, without necessarily constraining them to a set of universal dimensions.) This volume on Culture and Social Behavior is timely for reasons other than the growth of social psychology in eastern countries. For one thing, the world is an increasingly international place, with e-mail and the Internet making instant communication possible. Thus, understanding cultural differences has become even more important. Of course, recent events have also underscored the potential of cultural differences to provoke conflict, aggression, and violence. We must expand our knowledge of how culture influences psychological processes. The book contains 10 chapters from leaders in the fields of social and personality psychology describing their research program on culture and social behavior. There is also a concluding chapter by Richard Nisbett, which discusses the state of the field especially as pertains to the contributions in this volume. In chapter 1, Michael Ashton, Henry Danso, Gregory Maio, Victoria Esses, Michael Bond, and Doris Keung discuss the dimensions of political attitudes and their individual difference correlates. They report that, with a few notable exceptions, results across cultures reveal a relatively stable set of factors that they have labelled Humanitarianism and Religiosity. Additional investigations of individual difference correlates of these factors—including value dimensions, horizontal and vertical individualism and collectivism, and other constructs of social and political ideology—provide insight into their validity and meaning. In chapter 2, Michael Bond discusses beliefs in a universal model for social behavior. Five dimensions of these beliefs, viz., Cynicism, Reward for application, Social complexity, Fate control, and Spirituality, have been identified and measured in over 30 cultural groups. Equivalent ways for measuring the strength of these beliefs across cultures have been adduced, so that their level of endorsement in these cultures may be linked to cultural factors, such as economic development. Additionally, within a given cultural group, these beliefs have been related to behavior and other important psychological constructs, such as values and emotionality. The belief construct thus constitutes a potentially useful cornerstone for a universal theory of social behavior. In chapter 3, Dov Cohen and Etsuko Hoshino-Browne discuss perspectives on the self and the social world in Eastern and Western cultures. Lines of work are presented that are consistent with the argument that Easterners take a more "outside in" and Westerners take a more "inside out" view of the self and the world. The chapter also discusses the origins of this difference and the potential causal links between phenomenology and ideology. In chapter 4, Karen and Kenneth Dion address the issue of how the cultural values of individualism and collectivism influence personal relationships.

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In individualistic societies such as Canada or the United States, romantic love is valued as an important basis for marriage; and the ideology of romantic love contributes to expecting a high degree of personal fulfilment in marriage. However, some aspects or types of psychological individualism make it more difficult to realize these goals. Individual differences on attitudinal measures of individualism, especially self-contained individualism, are associated with less affective involvement with a romantic partner. In collectivistic societies such as India or China, romantic love is less likely to be valued as a basis for marriage. At the individual or psychological level, however, collectivism facilitates intimacy within the ingroup, and this intimacy is likely to be expressed in a complex system of family relationships. In chapter 5, Steven Heine examines self-enhancement and culture. Cultural differences on measures relating to self-esteem, self-serving biases, and self-evaluation maintenance are routinely observed between North American and East Asian samples. This chapter reviews this evidence and explores a number of psychological mechanisms that can help "unpackage" these differences. For example, self-enhancement appears to be associated with cultural values of independence, a tendency to weigh intrapsychic concerns more than interpersonal ones, a largely internal frame of reference, and stable views of self. In contrast, self-improvement is associated with interdependence, a greater weighting of interpersonal concerns over intrapsychic ones, an external frame of reference, and malleable views of self. Cultural differences in psychological phenomena aid us in identifying the underlying psychological mechanisms that sustain them. Li-Jun Ji presents five studies on culture and the perception of change in chapter 6, Chinese anticipated more changes from an initial state than Americans did. When events were changing in a particular direction, Chinese were more likely than Americans to predict changes in the direction. Moreover, for patterns with changing slopes, Chinese predicted greater change in the way the slopes changed, in comparison to Americans. In sum, the Chinese were more likely to predict cyclical development for events, whereas Americans were more likely to predict linear developments for events. In addition, those who predicted change were perceived as wiser by Chinese than by Americans. Implications for social attribution, tolerance for contradiction, persistence on tasks, and the illusion of control are discussed. In chapter 7, Shinobu Kitayama and Yukiko Uchida, introduces the notion of interdependent agency. Crafting the sense of "I" (or the agency) that locates the self in the attendant socio-cultural milieu is a universal human task. However, different cultures encourage the development of remarkably different forms of agency. In this chapter, two cross-culturally divergent modes of constructing personal agency are discussed. Specifically, in Western "independent" cultures, the agency is typically constructed in reference to privately held attitudes, preferences, and judgments. The agency, then, is likely to be

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experienced as fully detached from and independent of the surroundings. In contrast, in Eastern "interdependent" cultures, personal agency is constructed in reference to attitudes, preferences, and expectations held by relevant others. The agency, then, is likely to be experienced as inseparably engaged and interdependent with others in the surroundings. In chapter 8, Wei Qi Elaine Perunovic, Michael Ross, and Anne Wilson discuss language, culture, and conceptions of the self. In a study of bicultural individuals' self-assessments, Chinese-born students were randomly assigned to participate in either Chinese or English. Serving as controls, Canadian-born participants of either European or Chinese decent participated in English. The effects of the language manipulation paralleled findings in previous studies comparing East Asians to North Americans. Participants responding in Chinese reported more collective self-statements in open-ended self-descriptions, lower self-esteem on the Rosenberg (1965) scale, and more agreement with Chinese values than did the remaining groups. In their self-descriptions, participants writing in Chinese provided similar numbers of favorable and unfavorable self-statements. The other groups reported more favorable self-statements. Participants reporting in Chinese indicated similar levels of positive and negative mood. The remaining groups reported more positive mood. The study revealed few effects of culture, independent of language. In chapter 9, Richard Sorrentino, Yasunao Otsubo, Satoru Yasunaga, John Nezlek, Sadafusa Kouhara, and Paul Shuper present two studies examining Uncertainty Orientation within and across cultures. The first study shows that Canadian students are more uncertainty oriented than Japanese students (who are more certainty-oriented). Also, although Canadian students appear more individualistic, less uncertainty avoidant, and more unrealistic in their optimism than Japanese students, these differences are moderated by one's uncertainty orientation. In Canada, UOs show these characteristics more than COs. In Japan, COs show these characteristics more than UOs. These results are consistent with the theory of uncertainty orientation (Sorrentino & Roney, 2000), in that UOs should show positive emotional responses regarding the self in successful UO-centric societies such as Canada, whereas COs should show positive emotional responses regarding the self in successful CO-centric societies such as Japan. A second set of data, examining daily diary reports of emotional responses to events gives further support to the theory. In chapter 10 Harry Triandis discusses issues in individualismcollectivism research. Collectivism is a cultural pattern found in most traditional societies, especially in Asia, Latin America, and Africa. Triandis contrasts collectivism with individualism, which is a cultural pattern found mostly in Western Europe, North America, Australia, and New Zealand. This chapter

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describes some of the characteristics of this cultural pattern, its geographic and demographic distribution, and its antecedents and consequences. Finally, Richard E. Nisbett deals with the ghosts of cultural psychology past, present, and future in his concluding chapter. He discusses the historical development of the field as well as highlights developments in his own personal thinking. He considers the issue of when it is best to think of cultures as analogous to either an individual difference, a set of situations, or a syndrome of attributes that hang together. Related to this, he concludes by asking the question of what aspects of culture might be universal and what might be culture-specific. We believe these chapters illustrate both the diversity and vitality of research on the psychology of culture and social behavior. Our hope is that this volume will stimulate further research and theorizing in this area from psychologists of many cultural traditions. Nine previous Ontario Symposia on Personality and Social Psychology have been held. The series is designed to bring together scholars from across North America—and, in the case of the present symposium, the world—who work in the same substantive area, with the goals of identifying common concerns and integrating research findings. Participation by Canadian and international faculty and graduate students in the symposia has been gratifying. We hope that the symposia have contributed to (and will continue to stimulate) the growth of personality and social psychology in Ontario and Canada. The first Ontario Symposium, held at the University of Western Ontario in August 1978, dealt with social cognition (see Higgins, E. T., Herman. P., and Zanna, M. P. (Eds.) (1981). Social Cognition: The Ontario Symposium. Vol. 1. Hillsdale, N. J: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates); the second, held at the University of Waterloo in October 1979, had the theme of variability and consistency in social behavior (see Zanna, M.P., Higgins, E. T., and Herman, C. P. (Eds.) (1982). Consistency in Social Behavior: The Ontario Symposium. Vol. 2. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates); the third, held at the University of Toronto in May 1981, addressed the social psychology of physical appearance (see Herman, C. P., Zanna, M. P., and Higgins, E. T. (Eds.) (1986). Physical Appearance, Stigma, and Social Behavior: The Ontario Symposium. Vol. 3. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates); the fourth, held at the University of Western Ontario in October 1983, was concerned with relative deprivation and social comparison processes (see Olson, J. M., Herman, C. P., and Zanna, M. P. (Eds.) (1986). Relative Deprivation and Social Comparison: The Ontario Symposium. Vol. 4. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates); the fifth, held at the University of Waterloo in August 1984, dealt with social influence processes (see Zanna, M. P., Olson, J. M., and Herman, C. P. (Eds.) (1987). Social Influence: The Ontario Symposium. Vol. 5. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates); the sixth, held at the University of Western Ontario in June 1988, focused on self-inference processes (see Olson, J. M., and Zanna, M. P. (Eds.) (1990). Self-Inference Processes: The Ontario Symposium. Vol. 6. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum

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Associates); the seventh, held at the University of Waterloo in June, 1991, examined the topic of prejudice (see Zanna, M.P., and Olson, J.M. (Eds.). 1994). The Psychology of Prejudice: The Ontario Symposium. Vol.7. Hiilsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates). The eighth, held at the University of Western Ontario in August, 1993 examined the psychology of values (see, Seligman, C., Olson, J.M., and Zanna, M. P. (Eds.). 1996). The Psychology of Values: The Ontario Symposium. Vol.8. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates). The ninth, held at the University of Waterloo, May, 2000, dealt with motivated social perception (see Spencer, S. J., Fein, S., Zanna, M.P., and Olson, J.M. (Eds.). 2003). Motivated Social Perception: The Ontario Symposium. Vol.9. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates). Once again, primary financial support for the Tenth Ontario Symposium was provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, whose continuing support has been the backbone of the series. We are also deeply indebted to the Department of Psychology and the Faculty of Social Science at the University of Western Ontario for their financial and administrative support. We also thank the social psychology graduate students at the University of Western Ontario for aiding us in conducting the conference. Finally, we thank Larry Erlbaum for his continuing support and editorial guidance. Richard M. Sorrentino Dov Cohen James M. Olson Mark P. Zanna

Chapter 1

Two Dimensions of Political Attitudes and Their Individual Difference Correlates: A Cross-Cultural Perspective Michael C. Ashton, Brock University Henry A. Danso, Wesleyan University Gregory R. Maio, Cardiff University Victoria M. Esses, The University of Western Ontario Michael Harris Bond, Chinese University of Hong Kong Doris Ka Yi Keung, Chinese University of Hong Kong

People commonly describe variation in political attitudes in terms of a single broad dimension known as the left versus right political spectrum. In some countries, the "left" end of this dimension is known as liberalism, and the "right"end is known as conservatism. Although the attitudes defining each pole of this dimension are not clearly delineated, most people have an intuitive understanding of what each end of the dimension represents. Despite the popularity of the left-right political spectrum, however, it is not at all clear that the variation among individuals in their attitudes toward political issues can be adequately summarized in terms of this single broad dimension. Indeed, it is not difficult to think of persons, or even political parties, whose attitudes seem to include a mixture of left- and right-wing positions. For example, one could view Pope John Paul II as left-wing, in terms of his opposition to the death penalty and to certain aspects of capitalism, or as right-wing, in terms of his opposition to abortion and to homosexuality. Similarly, one could view Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura as left-wing, in terms of his favorability toward the legalization of prostitution and of certain drugs, or as right-wing, in terms of his opposition to various aspects of the welfare state. Examples such as these raise the possibility that there might exist two or more major dimensions of attitudes toward political issues, rather than just a single general factor of political attitudes. In addition, it is possible that these dimensions of political attitudes are relatively

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Ashton, Danso, Maio, Esses, Bond, Keung

invariant across cultures, though the specific issues that define these dimensions may vary. To examine this topic, then, it is necessary to examine the structure of political attitudes in a variety of cultural settings. The aim of this chapter is to describe our investigation of the structure of attitudes toward political issues in several cultures. In particular, we examine the cross-cultural generalizability of a two-dimensional structure of political attitudes in a number of countries, including the United States, Canada, Wales, Hong Kong, and Ghana. We also relate those two dimensions to a variety of important psychological dimensions that have been proposed as important variables across cultures, including the values dimensions of Openness to Change versus Conservation and of Self-Transcendence versus Self-Enhancement, Horizontal and Vertical Individualism-Collectivism, Right-Wing Authoritarianism, and Social Dominance Orientation.

Previous Research Interestingly, two researchers who studied the structure of political attitudes during the mid-20th century independently proposed a solution containing two dimensions. Ferguson (1939) factor-analyzed the responses of American participants to a small set of sociopolitical attitude scales, and obtained two factors that he called Religiosity and Humanitarianism. Religiosity was defined by belief in God and by opposition to birth control and the theory of evolution, whereas Humanitarianism was defined by rejection of harsh criminal punishments, including the death penalty, and by pacifism. Ferguson (1942) later added a third factor, Nationalism, which was defined by support for law, censorship, and patriotism, and by opposition to communism. However, Ferguson (1973) noted that this third factor was correlated with both Religiosity (positively) and Humanitarianism (negatively). In the 1950s, Eysenck (1954) conducted a large-scale exploratory factor analysis of the responses of English participants to 40 political attitude items, and found two factors that he left in unrotated form. The first unrelated factor, which he called Conservatism versus Radicalism, was a broad dimension defined positively by items involving capitalist economic policy, religious morality, punitiveness, militarism, and racism or ethnocentrism, and negatively by items involving socialism, secularism, leniency, racial egalitarianism, and pacifism. The second unrotated factor, which he called Toughmindedness versus Tendermindedness, was defined positively by religious morality but also by pacifism and leniency, and negatively by secularism but also by racism and punitiveness. If Eysenck's factors were rotated 45 degrees, they would closely resemble Ferguson's Religiosity and Humanitarianism dimensions (Rokeach & Hanley, 1956): One factor would contrast religious morality with secularism, and

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the other would contrast racism, militarism, and punitiveness with racial egalitarianism, pacifism, and leniency. Several researchers have rejected Eysenck's psychological interpretation of the Toughmindedness-Tendermindedness factor and his attempt to relate the two factors to Fascism and Communism (e.g., Altemeyer, 1981; Christie, 1956; Rokeach & Hanley, 1956). Nevertheless, the finding that Eysenck's set of political attitudes defined a two-dimensional space was not disputed. On the basis of further analyses involving a larger number of issues, Eysenck (1975) later added a third factor, called Politico-Economic Conservatism versus Socialism.

Related Domains During the later decades of the 20th century, there was relatively little interest in the structure of attitudes toward political issues, and no systematic attempts were undertaken to resolve the problem. (One notable exception is the work of Boski, 1993, who found that political attitudes in Poland could be organized in terms of two orthogonal factors corresponding to religious versus secular attitudes and capitalist versus socialist attitudes.) In retrospect, this lack of interest in what must be considered the fundamental question of political psychology is quite surprising, especially in light of the increasing popularity of that branch of psychological research. Nevertheless, the last quarter of the 20th century did witness the intensive investigation of several domains of psychological variation that overlap conceptually with political attitudes. These domains include the areas of social values, cultural variation, and broad social and political ideologies. Research by Schwartz and colleagues has suggested that social values— the abstract goals that serve as guiding principles in people's lives—can be summarized in terms of a two-dimensional structure (Schwartz, 1992,1994,1996; Schwartz & Bilsky, 1987; Schwartz & Sagiv, 1995). One of the two dimensions, named Openness to Change versus Conservation, is described by Schwartz (1996, p. 6) as "a conflict between emphases on own thought and action and favoring change versus submissive self-restriction, preservation of traditional practices, and protection of stability." The other dimension, named Self-Transcendence versus Self-Enhancement, is described by Schwartz (1996, p. 6) as "a conflict between acceptance of others as equals and concern for their welfare versus pursuit of one's own relative success and dominance over others." In the domain of cultural variation, Triandis (1995; Singelis et al., 1995; Triandis & Gelfand, 1998) has identified four varieties of cultures, whose characteristics are summarized in terms of these horizontal and vertical varieties of individualism and collectivism. Horizontal Collectivist cultures emphasize egalitarianism and cooperation, whereas Vertical Individualist cultures emphasize status-seeking and competition; Vertical Collectivist cultures emphasize the subordination of one's own goals to those specified by in-group authorities,

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whereas Horizontal Individualist cultures emphasize individual uniqueness. Thus, one can view these four constructs as occupying the poles of two axes within a two-dimensional space of cultural variation. It should be noted that the constructs of Horizontal and Vertical Individualism and Collectivism were originally developed as dimensions of variation between cultures; however, the constructs are also meaningful at the level of individual variation, and the IndividualismCollectivism scale was developed by Singelis et al. (1995) as an individual-level personality measure of the dimensions of Horizontal and Vertical Individualism and Collectivism. Within the domain of what might be termed general social and political ideologies (as opposed to attitudes regarding specific political issues, as studied by Ferguson and by Eysenck), recent research has increasingly focused on two constructs known as Social Dominance Orientation (SDO; Pratto, Sidanius, Stallworth, & Malle, 1994) and Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA; Altemeyer, 1981,1988,1996). The Social Dominance Orientation scale (SDO; Pratto et al., 1994) assesses individual differences in belief in inequality and preference for a hierarchically structured social system, with high levels of competition and intergroup dominance. The Right-Wing Authoritarianism scale (RWA; Altemeyer, 1981) assesses the three traits that Altemeyer has viewed as the central aspects of the authoritarianism construct: conformity to traditional moral beliefs, submission to authorities viewed as legitimate, and punitiveness toward authority-sanctioned targets such as out-group members and criminals. Both scales have generally shown considerable validity in the prediction of various attitudes toward specific social and political issues, particularly those involving prejudice or group conflict. Because SDO and RWA are generally only modestly intercorrelated, Duckitt (2000; Duckitt, Wagner, du Plessis, & Wirum, 2002) has suggested that these variables might represent two basic dimensions of social and political ideology. The apparent existence of two-dimensional structures within the domains of social values, cultural variation, and general social and political ideologies raises the possibility that these various spaces might map closely onto the plane of political attitudes that was proposed by Ferguson and by Eysenck. That is, despite some differences in the content of these various domains, individual differences within these domains might be explained in terms of a common two-dimensional space. Overview of Our Research The first purpose of the present series of studies was to determine whether the structure of attitudes toward political issues could be summarized in terms of a two-dimensional space, similar to that proposed by Ferguson and by Eysenck. To examine this issue, we first investigated the structure of political attitudes in the


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United States and Canada by assessing degree of agreement with various political issues.' We then examined the generalizability of the structure obtained to three other countries which differed in their political similarity to North America: Wales, Hong Kong, and Ghana. We also investigated the correspondence between the two-dimensional space and the planes that define the domains of social values, cultural variation, and general social and political ideologies.

STUDY 1: UNITED STATES Our first study involved an investigation of the two largest factors derived from Americans' attitudes on a variety of political issues. Specifically, we wanted to find out whether the first two unrelated factors would resemble Eysenck's dimensions of Radicalism-Conservatism and Toughmindedness-Tendermindedness, and whether the first two rotated factors would resemble Ferguson's dimensions of Humanitarianism and Religiosity. Participants were 922 American adults who were randomly selected and contacted by The Gallup Poll during April 25-28,1996. Although the sample was not a perfectly stratified random sample of Unites States adults, it was roughly representative of that population in terms of sex, race, age, region, community size, education, and income (see Saad, 1996). (Data were provided by the Roper Center.) As part of The Gallup Poll's 1996 issues referendum, participants were contacted by telephone and asked a series of demographic questions (see above), followed by some questions regarding voting intentions and support of political parties and of election candidates. Participants were then asked whether they would vote for or against a series of 27 propositions that were selected by The Gallup Poll as a diverse set of important political issues during the period preceding the 1996 elections (see Saad, 1996). For each referendum item, we scored an against response as a 1, a don't know response as a 2, and afor response as a 3. The proportion of don't know responses was generally very low, never exceeding 12% for any referendum item. Participants were also asked to indicate their degree of liberalism versus conservatism on a five-point scale (1 = very conservative, 5 = very liberal), and to indicate their political party preference. Of the participants, 894 answered the liberalism versus conservatism item, and 895 answered the political party preference item either as Republican, independent, or Democrat. Responses to the political party preference item were coded as "1" for Republican, "2" for independent, and "3" for Democrat; that is, higher numbers indicate increasingly "left-wing" political parry preference. The data used in this study have two important properties. First, the sample of respondents is reasonably representative of the United States adult population with regard to most important demographic variables. Second, the set

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of political issues was selected not with the aim of defining any particular factor structure, but instead with the aim of providing a broad and nearly comprehensive sampling of American political issues in the 1990s; therefore, the problem of researcher bias in the selection of issue items is minimized. As a result of these properties, the results presented here are likely to provide an accurate representation of the two largest factors of American attitudes toward political issues. Factor Analysis of Political Issues Items To control for the influence of response styles, we standardized responses across all 27 items within each participant; in other words, we converted each raw response to a standard score based on that participant's mean and standard deviation for all 27 items. We then conducted a principal components analysis of the 27 political issue items. Because our main aim in this study was to compare the two largest factors with those postulated by Eysenck and by Ferguson, we present the two-factor solution. .Unrotated Two-Factor Solution. To allow comparisons with Eysenck's two unrotated factors, we first investigated the unrolated two-factor solution. The loadings of the 27 items on the two largest unrotated factors are shown in Table 1.1. The large first unrotated factor was defined positively by such issues as legalization of gay/lesbian marriage, legalization of marijuana, relations with Cuba defence spending cutbacks, an increased minimum wage, doctor-assisted suicide, and minority preferences in jobs/school, and was defined negatively by such issues as prayer in schools, a balanced budget amendment, English as the official language, welfare cut-off after two years, and teaching creationism in public schools. Factor scores on this factor correlated .47 (p < .001) with self-rated liberalism (versus conservatism), and .37 (p < .001) with left-wing political party preference. Thus, the content and correlates of this factor both indicate that it represents overall Liberalism versus Conservatism, similar to Eysenck's Radicalism versus Conservatism. The second unrotated factor was defined positively by such issues as doctor-assisted suicide, the death penalty for murder, and a two-year welfare cutoff, and was defined negatively by such issues as an abortion ban, school busing for racial balance, and vouchers for school choice. This factor correlated only -.01 (ns) with self-rated liberalism, and only -.10 (p < .01) with left-wing political party preference. This factor closely resembles Eysenck's (1954) Toughmindedness versus Tendermindedness dimension, as it contrasts punitive attitudes (e.g., death penalty for murder) with attitudes related to religious morality (e.g., abortion ban), in the same way that Eysenck's factor did.

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Table 1.1 Loadings of 27 Political Issues Items on Two Unrolated and Two Varimax~Rotated Factors; United States Sample Varimax-Rotated Factors Unrelated Factors Liberalism Radicalism) vs. Conservatism

Welfare cutoff after two years School busing for racial balance Death penalty for murder Re-establishing relations with Cuba Raising the minimum wage Reducing defence spending English as the official language Minority preferences in jobs/school Reducing all government agencies Immigration freeze for five years Life sentences for drug dealers Balanced budget amendment Congressional term limits amendment Federal flat tax system Mandatory job retraining after downsizing Doctor-assisted suicide Legalization of homosexual marriages Ban on abortions Prayer in public schools Teaching creationism in public schools Legalization of marijuana Vouchers for school choice Ban on assault rifles Ban on partial-birth abortions Reducing social spending Withdrawal of U.S. from U.N. Privatization of public lands

-.37

.33 -.23

Tough' Mindedness vs. TenderMindedness

Compassion vs. Competition

Moral Regulation vs. Individual Freedom

.44 -.42 .45

-.57

-.08 -.14 -.11

-.10 .12 -.20 -.23 -.17 -.21 .11 -.08 -.05 .08 .08 .23 -.07

.52 -.46

.47 .43 45 -.38 .36 -.27 -.32 -.30 -.40 -.21

.17 -.19 .29 .16 .15 .03 -.26

.42 .41 .41 -.40 .40 -.39 -.34 -.33 -.33 -.32

-.20 .21

.17 -.07

-.26 .21

.03 -.08

.37 .59

.50 .25

-.04 .29

-.62 -.57

-.27 -.45 -.36

-.48 -.27 -.31

.00 -.17 -.08

.55 .50 .46

.50 -.13 .30 -.17 -.20 -.03 -.14

.17 -.37 .19 -.18 .12 -.15 -.15

.28 .13 .11 -.01 -.08 -.01 .08

-.45 .37 -.34 .24 .22 .21 .13

Note: N = 922. Loadings with absolute values of at least .30 are shown in bold type.

8


Rotated Two-Factor Solution. The loadings of the 27 items on two varimax-rotated factors are also shown in Table 1.1. The first factor was defined positively by such policies as school busing for racial balance, re-establishment of diplomatic relations with Cuba, an increased minimum wage, reduced defence spending, and (minority) racial preferences in jobs and school. It was also defined negatively by such policies as a two-year welfare cutoff, the death penalty for murder, English as the official language, cutbacks of all government agencies, an immigration freeze, life sentences for drug dealers, a balanced budget amendment, and a congressional term limits amendment. The issues defining this factor contrast a willingness to treat all persons generously with a preference for strict competition and punishment; therefore, we labelled this factor Compassion versus Competition. This factor closely resembled Ferguson's Humanitarianism dimension. Factor scores on this factor correlated .35 (p < .001) with self-rated liberalism, and .35 (p < .001) with left-wing (i.e., Democrat) political party preference. The second factor was defined positively by such policies as a general abortion ban, prayer in public schools, teaching creationism in public schools, and vouchers for school choice. It was also defined negatively by such policies as legalization of doctor-assisted suicide, legalization of gay/lesbian marriages, and legalization of marijuana. The issues defining this factor contrast a preference for legislated standards of morality or "family values" with a preference for individual freedom of choice on personal issues; therefore, we labelled this factor Moral Regulation versus Individual Freedom. This factor closely resembled Ferguson's Religiosity dimension. Factor scores on this factor correlated -.31 (p < .001) with self-rated liberalism, and -. 16 (p < .001) with left-wing political party preference.

Summary The political attitude factors that were obtained in this study show a remarkable similarity to the dimensions postulated decades ago by Eysenck (1954) and by Ferguson (1939). First, the first two unrelated factors of this study resemble the (also unrelated) dimensions obtained by Eysenck (1954): LiberalismConservatism and Toughmindedness-Tendermindedness. (In fact, two of the issues that define the second unrotated factor of Table 1.1—capital punishment and abortion—also defined Eysenck's (1954) second unrotated factor.) Similarly, the two rotated factors of this study bear obvious similarities to Ferguson's (also rotated) dimensions. In terms of Ferguson's (1939) axes, the first rotated factor resembles Ferguson's Humanitarianism dimension, and the second rotated factor resembles Ferguson's Religiosity dimension. The fact that the structures proposed by Eysenck and Ferguson have emerged after two generations from a set of items thai was developed without any a priori attempt to produce those structures is an impressive replication of their findings.


9

The results of this study also raise the question of which of the two orientations of the factor axes—the unrelated dimensions or the rotated dimensions—provide the most theoretically meaningful structure. The unrotated two-factor solution may be seen as having the advantage of providing an overall Liberalism-Conservatism dimension, which is of obvious significance in politics; moreover, the Toughmindedness-Tendermindedness dimension also has some theoretical basis (Eysenck, 1954), although this has been criticized (Altemeyer, 1981; Christie, 1956; Rokeach & Hanley, 1956). However, despite the utility of an overall Liberalism-Conservatism axis, the unrotated factors suffer from the disadvantage that they each span the entire range of issue content, whereas the two rotated factors, being closer to simple structure, are interpretable in terms of their relatively independent domains of issue content (see Table 1.1).

STUDY 2: CANADA In our second study, we wanted to find out whether the two-dimensional structure of attitudes toward political issues that had been recovered in the United States would also emerge in Canada. In addition, we hoped to investigate the relations between this two-dimensional space and the two major dimensions from the domains of social values, of cultural variation, and of general social and political ideologies. We expected, first, that the structure of political issues in Canada would be quite similar to the structure obtained in the United States, despite some differences in the specific issues that were relevant in the two countries. Moreover, we expected to find some similarities between the two varimax-rotated axes of political issues, similar to those of Ferguson, and the two main dimensions within the various other domains that were discussed above. First, we expected that a Moral Regulation factor of attitudes toward political issues would be associated with Conservation (vs. Openness to Change) values, with Vertical Collectivism (vs. Horizontal Individualism), and with Right-Wing Authoritarianism. These predictions were based on the similarities of content of these dimensions, as described above. In particular, all of these constructs involve individual differences in the wish to regulate and restrict individuals' behavior for the presumed benefit of some common collective. In addition, we expected that a Compassion factor of attitudes toward political issues would be associated with Self-Transcendence (vs. Self-Enhancement) values, with Horizontal Collectivism (vs. Vertical Individualism), and with low Social Dominance Orientation. Again, these predictions were based on the resemblance of content among these dimensions, as described above. In particular, all of these constructs involve individual differences in the tendency to treat other persons generously or leniently, regardless of the identity or the perceived deservingness of those other persons.

10


Participants were 350 undergraduate students at the University of Western Ontario who participated for course credit. The participants belonged to three separate samples of sizes 108, 139, and 103. The median age of participants was 20 years, and 69% of participants were women. The participants of all three samples completed the political issues survey (see Table 1.2). This survey assessed attitudes using a set of 32 items, based in part on those used by Maio, Roese, Seligman, and Katz (1996) and Maio and Esses (2001), which were intended to be representative of the domain of issues in Canada during the 1990s. Like the issues used in the American study, earlier, these items were selected without any attempt to define a particular structure of political issues. The response format was a nine-point scale, ranging from extremely unfavorable (-4) to extremely favorable (+4). The 139 participants of the second sample also completed the 56-item Schwartz Values Survey, administered in the nine-point scale format recommended by Schwartz (1992), as well as a 10-item version of the Social Dominance Orientation scale (Pratto et al., 1994), and an 11-item version of the Right-Wing Authoritarianism scale (Altemeyer, 1981), both in a nine-point scale format. The 103 participants of the third sample completed a 16-item questionnaire measuring Horizontal Collectivism, Vertical Collectivism, Horizontal Individualism, and Vertical Individualism (Singelis et al., 1995; Triandis & Gelfand, 1998).

Factor Analysis of Political Issues Items Although part of the purpose of this study was to determine whether the two factors obtained in the first study would replicate, we conducted an exploratory rather than a confirmatory factor analysis, for two reasons. First, many of the issues in the Canadian variable set of the present study were not included in the American variable set of the previous study, and we would have been very unlikely to specify accurately, a priori, the primary and secondary loadings of all variables in the two-dimensional space. Second, as shown by McCrae, Zonderman, Costa, Bond, and Paunonen (1996, p. 552), confirmatory factor analysis "is systematically flawed: its statistical indices reject models that are empirically replicable and accept models that are not." To control for the influence of response styles, we standardized responses across the 32 items within each participant; in other words, we converted each raw response to a standard score based on that participant's mean and standard deviation for all 32 items. We then conducted a principal-components analysis of ratings on the 32 items across all 350 respondents. Interestingly, the unrelated two-factor solution was virtually identical to the varimax-rotated two-factor solution; overall Liberalism-Conservatism did not emerge as the first unrelated factor.

1. Two Dimensions of Political Attitudes Table 1.2 Loadings of 32 Political Issues on Two Varimax-Rotated Factors; Canadian Sample Factor Moral Regulation vs. Individual Freedom

Legalized abortion Doctor-assisted suicide for terminally ill Legalization of marijuana Prayer in public schools Ban on casino gambling Increased taxes on alcohol Permitting sexual/violent content on TV Red-light districts for prostitutes Adoption rights for homosexual couples Increased smoking restrictions Ban on human cloning Ban on race superiority/Holocaust denial claims Capital punishment for murder Publicly-funded day-care system Increased aid to developing countries Native land claims settlements Reduced immigration levels French-language services from Ontario gov't Mandatory "workfare" for welfare recipients Harsher punishment of young offenders No parole for repeat criminal offenders Privatization of health-care system Lower taxes on corporate profits/high incomes Stricter gun-control legislation Logging in old-growth forests Preferential hiring for women, minorities "Distinct society" status for Quebec Pay equity law for men and women Increased minimum wage Stricter pollution controls Reduced defense spending Increased education spending

-.69 -.65 -.59 .58 .53 .50 -.50 -.48 -.46 .39 .33 .26 .02 -.01 .25 -.08 -.18 .05 -.08 .09 .15 .08 -.03 .17 .17 .26 .02 .11 .00 -.02 .00 .11


.03 -.10 .23 -.10 .07 -.08 -.26 -.07 .42 -.13 .06 .04 -.55 .52 .51 .44 -.40 .40 -.39 -.38 -.37 -.37 -.32 .29 -.29 .28 .26 .25 .21 .15 .13 .11


11

12


The loadings of the political issues items on the two varimax-rotated factors are shown in Table 1.2. The first factor was defined positively by such policies as prayer in public schools, a casino gambling ban, increased taxes on alcohol, and increased restrictions on public smoking. It was also defined negatively by such policies as legalized abortion, doctor-assisted suicide, legalization of marijuana, allowing violent or sexual content on television, red-light districts for prostitutes, and adoption rights for homosexual couples. Thus, the content of this factor corresponded closely to that of the Moral Regulation (vs. Individual Freedom) factor in the American data set. The inclusion of issues related to pornography, prostitution, alcohol, tobacco, and gambling within this study apparently made this factor considerably larger than its counterpart from the American data set, and larger than the Compassion factor described below. The second factor was defined positively by such policies as publicly funded day care, increased aid to developing countries, Native land claims settlements, and French-language services from the Ontario provincial government. It was also defined negatively by such policies as capital punishment for murderers, reduced immigration levels, mandatory "workfare" for welfare recipients, stricter punishment for young offenders, elimination of parole for violent offenders, privatization of health care, and reduced corporate and high-income taxes. Thus, the content of this factor corresponded closely to that of the Compassion (versus Competition) factor from the American data set, except that many of the most highly-loaded issues are specifically Canadian, rather than specifically American.

Relations of Issues Factors With Individual Differences Variables Table 1.3 shows correlations between the two political issues factors and the various individual differences variables, within the second and third participant samples. Values Dimensions. As noted above, we were primarily interested in the two broad dimensions of values described by Schwartz (1992, 1994, 1996; Schwartz & Sagiv, 1995). These dimensions are not routinely calculated from specific items of Schwartz's Value Survey. Therefore, we measured those two dimensions by calculating factor scores for participants on two varimax-rotated factors extracted from the full set of 56 specific values, after first standardizing the 56 ratings within each participant to prevent the emergence of an acquiescence factor from the raw ratings (Schwartz, 1994). The first factor was defined positively by the value items honest, protecting environment, equality, spirituality, broad-mindedness, harmony, and


13

forgiveness, and negatively by the value items authority, social recognition, wealth, public image, success, and influence. Most of these items belong to the Universalism, Benevolence, Power, and Achievement value types, which in turn define the value dimension of Self-Transcendence versus Self-Enhancement (Schwartz, 1992, 1994). Thus, we used factor scores on the first factor to represent participants' levels of Self-Transcendence versus Self-Enhancement. The second factor was defined positively by the value items obedient, devout, and tradition, and negatively by the value items excitement, daring, variety, independent, enjoying life, and curiosity. Most of the defining items belong to the Conformity, Tradition, Self-Direction, Stimulation, and Hedonism value types, which in turn define the values dimension of Conservation versus Openness to Change (Schwartz, 1992, 1994). Thus, we used factor scores on the second factor to represent participants' levels of Conservation versus Openness to Change. As predicted, the political issues factors showed a clear pattern of relations with the two values dimensions (see Table 1.3): the Moral Regulation factor correlated with Conservation versus Openness to Change, whereas the Compassion factor correlated with Self-Transcendence versus Self-Enhancement. The discriminant correlations, by contrast, were small and nonsignificant.

Table 1.3 Correlations of Political Issues Factors with Individual Differences Variables; Canadian Sample Issues Factor Moral Regulation vs. Individual Freedom

Values Dimensions' Openness to Change versus Conservation Self-Transcendence versus Self-Enhancement Horizontal & Vertical Individualism-Collectivism** Vertical Collectivism - Horizontal Individualism (.55) Horizontal Collectivism - Vertical Individualism (.62) Social and Political Ideology Scales' Right-Wing Authoritarianism (.81) Social Dominance Orientation (.85)


-.56** .13

.04 .36**

.34** . 11

-.09 .49**

.38** -.03

-.31** -.36**

Note: Internal-consistency reliabilities (Cronbach's alpha) of each scale are given in parentheses. • N = 139; b N = 103. * p < .05, ** p < .001 (two-tailed).

14


Horizontal and Vertical Individualism and Collectivism. As predicted, the political issues dimensions were significantly correlated with the variables assessing Horizontal and Vertical Individualism and Collectivism (see Table 1.3). The Moral Regulation factor correlated positively with Vertical Collectivism and negatively with Horizontal Individualism, whereas the Compassion factor correlated positively with Horizontal Collectivism and negatively with Vertical Individualism. Relations between the political issues factors and two composite scales (Vertical Collectivism minus Horizontal Individualism, and Horizontal Collectivism minus Vertical Individualism) were stronger than for the single scales alone. Discriminant correlations were small and non-significant. Social Dominance Orientation and Right-Wing Authoritarianism. Consistent with our predictions, the Moral Regulation factor correlated positively with Right-Wing Authoritarianism, whereas the Compassion factor correlated negatively with Social Dominance Orientation and with Right-Wing Authoritarianism (see Table 1.3). The negative correlation between Compassion and Right-Wing Authoritarianism probably reflects the "authoritarian aggression" component of RWA, which, unlike the other elements of conformity and authoritarian submission, involves an element of hostility; presumably, this aggressive aspect of authoritarianism is also responsible for the modest correlations observed between RWA and SDO.

Summary Two political issues factors similar to those found in the United States were evident in Canada, and these factors showed a simple pattern of correlations with the dimensions of social values, cultural variation, and social and political ideology. The Moral Regulation (vs. Individual Freedom) issues factor correlated with the Conservation versus Openness to Change values dimension, the cultural variation axis of Vertical Collectivism versus Horizontal Individualism, and the ideological dimension of Right-Wing Authoritarianism. The Compassion (vs. Competition) factor correlated with the Self-Transcendence versus Self-Enhancement values dimension, the cultural variation axis of Horizontal Collectivism versus Vertical Individualism, and the ideological dimension of Social Dominance Orientation. These results indicate that the two main factors of attitudes toward political issues correspond closely to the major dimensions of social values, cultural variation, and general social and political ideologies.

Development of New Ideology Scales The foregoing results showed an interesting pattern of nearly isomorphic relations between the two factors of attitudes toward political issues and the two dimensions


15

of the domains of social values, cultural variation, and general social and political ideologies. Therefore, this pattern of results raises the prospect of accounting for these various domains of individual differences in terms of a single common set of two dimensions of psychological variation. If the central content of each of these two broad factors could be found, then we would develop a more thorough understanding of the meaning of individual differences in these domains. Moreover, we might ultimately replace the various domains of political issues, social values, cultural variation, and social and political ideologies with a much more parsimonious two-dimensional structure of individual differences. Inspection of the content of the two major factors within each domain— attitudes toward political issues, social values, cultural variation, and general social and political ideologies—suggested to us that the core content of the two factors could be summarized as follows. First, we concluded that the dimensions of Moral Regulation (vs. Individual Freedom), Conservation (vs. Openness to Change), Vertical Collectivism (vs. Horizontal Collectivism), and Right-Wing Authoritarianism are linked by the question of the extent to which individuals' behavior should be regulated or restricted for the perceived good of some broader social unit, such as the family, the community, the ethnic group, or the state. Second, we concluded that the dimensions of Compassion (vs. Competition), Self-Transcendence (vs. Self-Enhancement), Horizontal Collectivism (vs. Vertical Individualism), and Social Dominance Orientation are linked by the question of the extent to which individuals should be treated with kindness and generosity, regardless of their status in society. In order to measure these two constructs, which we view as central to the two dimensions that span each of the several individual difference domains described above, we developed self-report scales assessing attitudes relevant to the trade-offs between Moral Regulation and Individual Freedom, and between Compassion and Competition. The items of these scales address these conflicts in general terms, rather than in the context of specific issues (e.g., smoking, abortion, welfare, capital punishment) that may not be applicable across cultures or generations. Two example items are "Laws should limit personal freedom and pleasure for the good of family cohesion and social order" (Moral Regulation), and "Our social policies should be based on compassion for others" (Compassion). We administered these items to 103 Canadian university students, and found internal-consistency reliabilities of .81 (for Moral Regulation) and .84 (for Compassion); the two scales intercorrelated only -.02. Thus, the two scales showed adequate levels of internal-consistency reliability, and were virtually orthogonal to each other. In order to evaluate the two scales in terms of the extent to which they did, in fact, underlie the major dimensions of attitudes toward political issues, we next administered them to a sample of participants from a third nation, Wales.

16


STUDY 3: WALES Our next study, conducted in Wales, was intended to investigate the structure of attitudes toward political issues outside of North America, but still within a Western and English-speaking context. In addition, we wanted to examine the relations between the two largest Welsh political issues factors and the new more general ideological constructs that we had developed on the basis of our North American results. Specifically, we hypothesized that the two main factors of attitudes toward political issues in Wales would be strongly and univocally correlated with our new Moral Regulation (vs. Individual Freedom) and Compassion (vs. Competition) scales. Participants were 87 undergraduate students at Cardiff University who participated in exchange for course credit. The median age of participants was 20 years, and 69% of participants were women. All participants completed a political issues survey, which assessed attitudes using a set of 37 items that were intended to be representative of the important political issues in Wales at the time of data collection. As in the previous studies, the items were not selected as a priori markers of the two expected factors. In addition to the political issues survey, the respondents also completed the new general ideology scales measuring Moral Regulation (vs. Individual Freedom) and Compassion (vs. Competition). The response format for all items was a nine-point scale, ranging from extremely unfavorable (-4) to extremely favorable (+4).

Factor Analysis of Political Issues Items After ipsatizing each participant's responses, we extracted two factors (i.e., components) from the Welsh political issues items and rotated the factors to a varimax solution. Loadings of the items on those two factors can be seen in Table 1.4, and inspection of the content of the factors suggests similarities to the Religiosity and Humanitarianism factors. The first factor was defined by issues such as gambling restrictions, a ban on pornography, and capital punishment versus legalization of marijuana, legalization of abortion, a gay/lesbian rights law, greater integration with Europe and adoption of the Euro currency. Except for the anomalous loading of capital punishment (which also defined the other factor, below), most of these items are similar to those of the Moral Regulation (vs. Individual Freedom) factors in the American and Canadian studies. One additional feature, however, is that items related to European integration and currency are also loaded on the "Individual Freedom" end of this factor, and these items seem less relevant to a Moral Regulation interpretation of the dimension.


17

The second factor was defined by issues such as the provision of housing for the poor, increased foreign aid to developing countries, government subsidies for working parents, and increased social benefits payments, versus harsher punishments for criminals generally and pedophiles in particular, as well as capital punishment, and reduced numbers of asylum-seekers. Thus, the combination of items related to economic assistance for the poor, ethnic or international relations, and criminal punishment suggests that this factor resembles the Compassion (vs. Competition) dimension that was found in North America. Thus, the two Welsh factors of attitudes toward political issues seemed superficially similar to those found in North America. However, some possible anomalies were observed in the content of the Moral Regulation factor, so some test of these interpretations is desirable. Fortunately, our administration of the Moral Regulation and Compassion scales to the Welsh participants allows a comparison between the Welsh attitudes factors and the constructs that we have proposed as representing the psychological basis of the two issues factors.

Relations of Issues Factors With Moral Regulation and Compassion Scales Correlations between participants' factor scores on the two issues factors and the Moral Regulation and Compassion scales were strong and nearly isomorphic: the first factor correlated .59 with the Moral Regulation scale, the second factor correlated .58 with the Compassion scale, and the two discriminant correlations were nonsignificant. (In this Welsh sample, Moral Regulation and Compassion had internal-consistency reliabilities of .85 and .80, respectively, and intercorrelated -.05.) Thus, these patterns of correlations are consistent with our interpretation of the Welsh issues factors as close counterparts of the North American issues factors, and also support our claim that the constructs of Moral Regulation and Compassion form the psychological basis of the issues factors.

STUDY4: HONGKONG In order to investigate the generalizability of the two-dimensional structure of political issues to a non-Western setting, we also collected data in Hong Kong. We expected that although many of the salient political issues in Hong Kong would differ from those in Western countries, there would nevertheless emerge factors interpretable as Moral Regulation and Compassion in Hong Kong. Participants were 204 undergraduate students at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, who participated in exchange for course credit. The median age of participants was 20 years, and 49% of participants were women.

18

Ashton, Danso, Maio, Esses, Bond, Keung Table 1.4 Loadings of 37 Political Issues on Two Varimax-Rotated Factors: Welsh Sample Factor Moral Regulation vs. Individual Freedom

Legalization of marijuana Stronger restrictions on gambling Legalized abortion Legislation to protect gay and lesbian rights Closer integration with Europe Ban on pornography Capital punishment Britain joining the European dollar Alternative lifestyles education Aid for farmers Stronger measures to reduce unemployment Legalized prostitution Euthanasia Withdrawal of Britain from Northern Ireland Increased funding for public transportation Reduced taxes Tougher action against political corruption Increased funding for National Health Service Stronger restrictions on public smoking Devolution of power to Wales Increased minimum wage Tougher sanctions against criminals Provision of better housing for poor Reduced number of asylum seekers Stronger punishment for child abuse Increased aid to 3rd world countries Increased financial support for working parents Increased social benefits payments Changing tax systems to reduce class divide Publish addresses of released pedophiles Increased measures to protect environment Creation of national assembly for England Elimination of tuition fees


-.59

.08

.56

-.03 -.15

-.54 -.54 -.51

.51 .51 -.50 -.46

.40 .38 -.38 -.37 -.36 -.34

.32 .29 .27 .26 -.20 -.20

.35

.15 -.20 -.04 -.50 -.06

.19 .22 .33 -.09 -.12 -.35

.12 .07 .12 .23 -.08 -.10

.16 -.70

-.06

.63

.36 .07 .18 .20 .06 .19 .27

-.51 -.49

.44 .43 .43 .40 -.35

-.09

.34

.04

-.33

-.02

.31 Continued...


19

Table 1.4 (Continued) Loadings of 37 Political Issues on Two Varimax-Rotated Factors: Welsh Sample Factor Moral Regulation vs. Individual Freedom

Increased immigration into Great Britain Affirmative action/employment equity programs Stop developing genetically modified food Stronger laws to protect animal rights

-.22

.09 .15 .10


.30 .26 .24 .20

Note: N= 87. Loadings with absolute values of at least .30 are shown in bold type.

All participants completed a political issues survey that contained 32 items selected to represent important contemporary political issues in Hong Kong. The response format for all items was a nine-point scale, ranging from extremely unfavorable (-4) to extremely favorable (+4). At the time that these data were collected, the new general ideology scales measuring Moral Regulation and Compassion were not yet ready for administration. In order to examine the relations with other important dimensions, however, participants also completed a questionnaire designed to assess five social axioms, universal dimensions of general beliefs about how the world functions (Leung et al., 2002). Spiritual Consequences assesses a belief in religion and in the supernatural. Social Cynicism assesses bias against some groups of people, mistrust of social institutions, and disregard for ethics. Reward for Application assesses the belief that work, knowledge, and planning will yield positive results. Social Flexibility assesses the belief that people's behavior is inconsistent and that there are no rigid rules but rather several ways of reaching a goal. Finally, Control by Fate assesses the belief that destiny influences life events.

Factor Analysis of Political Issues Items After ipsatizing each participant's responses, we extracted two factors (i.e., components) from the Hong Kong political issues items, and rotated these factors to a varimax solution. Loadings of the items on these factors are shown in Table 1.5. The first factor was defined by issues such as restricting sexual content in newspapers, placing a tax on alcohol, and adding more non-smoking areas versus legalization of abortion, legalization of euthanasia, building a casino, and recognition of gay/lesbian marriage. Thus, although this factor lacks any

20

Ashton, Danso, Maio, Esses, Bond, Keung Table 1.5 Loadings of 32 Political Issues on Two Varimax-Rotated Factors: Hong Kong Sample Factor Moral Regulation vs. Individual Freedom

No sex in newspapers Legalized abortion Legalized euthanasia Build casino Legalize gay and lesbian marriage Alcohol tax More non-smoking areas Regulation of organic foods Regulation of newspapers Subsidies for elderly Reduced gun control Reduced pollution Govt stabilization of property market Privatization of hospitals Minimum wage Apply for Asian Olympics More migrants from China Capital punishment Equal salaries for mainlanders Stronger punishment of teenage crime Help for low-income persons One-dragon education policy Hong Kong request Basic Laws power More funding for high-tech research More resources for police Equal rights for inheritances Workfare for welfare recipients 24-hour passage at Lowu Indexed raises for civil servants Lower taxes for rich Intervention between China & Taiwan Flag and anthem in schools

.58 -.56 -.55 -.54 -.53

.44 .44 .39 .33 .32 -.28 -.28 .26 -.26 .25 .08 -.15 -.26 .18 .07 .22 -.06 .09 -.03 .20 .24 -.02 -.13 -.06 -.13 .04 .02


-.05 -.12 -.29 -.06

.10 -.10 -.27 -.24 -.07

.30 -.08

.15 -.03

.02 .22 .06 .56 -.49 .48 -.49 .43 .41 -.38 .32 .29 -.28 -.28 .25 .16 -.16 -.14 .05

Note: N= 204. Loadings with absolute values of at least .30 are shown in bold type.


21

explicitly religious content, it is nevertheless defined by many items very similar to those that loaded on the Moral Regulation (vs. Individual Freedom) factor obtained in the United States, Canada, and Wales. The second factor was defined by issues such as allowing increased numbers of migrants from mainland China, equal pay for professionals from mainland China, and help for low-income persons versus capital punishment and harsher punishment of teenage criminals. Again, as in other samples, this factor combines items related to economic redistribution, ethnic relations, and criminal punishment. Thus, this factor closely resembles the Compassion (vs. Competition) factor that has emerged in the three Western countries studied above.

Relations of Issues Factors With Social Axioms Of note, the Spiritual Consequences axiom correlated .49 with the Moral Regulations issues factor. This supports the similarity of this factor to those obtained in the other countries. However, none of the social axioms correlated significantly with the Compassion factor. Although one might have expected the Social Cynicism axiom to correlate with the Compassion factor because of its inclusion of bias against some groups of people, the fact that it also includes items about mistrust of social institutions and unethical behavior likely prevented such a correlation from being obtained.

Summary Overall, then, the two Hong Kong political issues factors were clearly similar to the Moral Regulation and Compassion factors obtained in Western samples, despite some differences in the precise content of the issues defining the factors. The relation between the Spiritual Consequences axiom and the Moral Regulation factor supports the interpretation of this factor. An additional empirical verification of the nature of the factors would be desirable, however, so future research should test the relations between the two Hong Kong political issues factors and our new Moral Regulation and Compassion scales. A pattern of strong and isomorphic correlations between the two sets of constructs would support our claim of the similarity between the Hong Kong and Western factor solutions, and would also support our theoretical interpretation of the nature of those factors.

STUDY 5: GHANA Our next round of data collection took place in Ghana, another non-Western country whose political history differs markedly from that of the United States, Canada, and Wales. Ghana was of particular interest both because it is an African

22


country, and therefore represents a non-Western culture entirely different from that of Hong Kong, and because at the time of data collection Ghana was only beginning to emerge from a long period of one-party rule. Participants were 204 undergraduate university students who participated during class time. The median age of the participants was 24 years, and 38% of participants were women. In terms of ethnic composition, 44% belonged to the Akan ethnic group, 38% were non-Akans, and 19% did not indicate their ethnicity. A total of 140 participants indicated their political party affiliation. Out of this number, 19% indicated support for the then ruling NDC political party, 36% were undecided, and 45% supported the various opposition parties. All participants independently provided responses to 29 political issues items selected to be representative of important contemporary issues in Ghana, using a nine-point scale. Participants also completed a questionnaire containing the Moral Regulation and Compassion scales. In addition, the participants provided demographic information relating to their ethnicity, religion, and political party preference. Factor Analyses of Political Issues Items Participants' responses to the 29 political issues were ipsatized, and a factor (i.e., principal components) analysis of the political issues was conducted. Loadings of the issues items on two varimax-rotated factors are shown in Table 1.6. Interestingly, the two factors obtained in this sample do not have any clear, one-to-one correspondence to the Moral Regulation and Compassion factors that were obtained in the other samples. The first factor was defined by issues such as government assistance for street youth and introduction of a minimum wage law versus legalization of prostitution, legalization of abortion, and introduction of a minimum age for marriage law. Thus, one pole of this factor involves economic aspects of Compassion, whereas the other pole involves aspects of Individual Freedom. The second factor was defined by issues such as increased police funding, increased education funding, stricter penalties for corruption, and shared decision-making between government and opposition versus privatization of nationalized companies and introduction of a value-added tax. The common denominator underlying these issues seems to be opposition to, versus support for, the (then) governing party. The issues at the positive pole of the factor all reflect initiatives favored by the opposition party, whereas those at the negative pole of the factor were initiatives introduced by the current government. Interestingly, scores on these factors were correlated with some of the demographic variables. Scores on the first factor were associated with conservatism of religious denomination, such that participants belonging to the more "evangelical" denominations had higher scores than did participants


23

belonging to the more "mainline" denominations. Scores on the second factor correlated with support for the opposition political party, rather than the governing party. Correlations between the two political issues factors and the Moral Regulation and Compassion scales were very low; the only significant correlation was the .24 correlation between the first factor and Moral Regulation. Thus, both in terms of the content of the factors and their correlations with our new general ideology scales, there was no clear correspondence between the Ghanaian political issues factors and those obtained in the other samples.

Reasons for the Discrepancy Several hypotheses can be suggested for why the structure of political issues obtained in Ghana differed from that obtained in the other countries. One possibility is that the political situation in Ghana—characterized at the time by an ongoing erosion of power for the governing party, which had ruled Ghana for many years—might have polarized political attitudes around issues that were more strongly related to the tenure of the governing parry (e.g., corruption penalties, shared decision making) than to any underlying dimension of political attitudes. According to this hypothesis, other countries experiencing similar processes (e.g., Mexico during the 1990s) would have produced similar structures. Another possibility is that the structure of political attitudes was influenced by some other variable. In the Ghanaian case, one candidate would be Christianity, which, in the form practised in Ghana, might have influenced not only Moral Regulation-related attitudes, but also Compassion-related attitudes. This might explain why, on the first Ghanaian factor, issues apparently related to Compassion were opposed by issues related to Individual Freedom. Interestingly, the Moral Regulation and Compassion ideology scales showed a small positive intercorrelation, .24, in the Ghanaian sample, whereas these scales were virtually uncorrelated in Canada and Wales. Finally, it is also possible that some of the Ghanaian students who participated in this study did not respond entirely frankly, given the somewhat repressive political culture in Ghana at the time, or that this lack of political freedom had inhibited the development of coherent structures of political attitudes. Some error variance was likely also introduced by the relative unfamiliarity of the Ghanaian participants with questionnaire scales of the kind administered in this study. In any case, future research in Ghana, or in nearby countries, should investigate further the structure of political attitudes in West Africa.

24

Ashton, Danso, Maio, Esses, Bond, Keung Table 1.6 Loadings of 29 Political Issues on Two Varimax-Rotated Factors; Ghanaian Sample Factor

Legalized prostitution Government assistance for street youth Legalized Abortion Minimum age for marriage set by government Minimum daily wage law Government control over emigration Laws requiring Christians to respect traditional Ghana religions, customs Death penalty Unlimited Foreign investment in Ghana Dual citizenship Restrictions on alcohol advertising Proportional representation of all ethnic group in government Restrictions on political campaign spending Libel laws Quotas for equal represent, of men & women in govt & high paying jobs Censorship of foreign culture Legal right to hold demonstrations Increased resources for police service Decision-making shared between ruling and opposition parties University tuition fees paid in full by the government Severe punishment for government officials who engage in corruption Privatization of government-owned corporations "Value Added Tax" Development projects distributed equally across Regions Stricter gun control Life sentences for convicted armed robbers Freedom of the press Trade liberalization Strict punishment for drug trafficking

1

2

-.65

-.18

.59 -.57 -.51 .45 .43 -.40

-.16 -.23 -.38 -.16 -.16

.00 .01

-.38 -.36 -.35

-.12 -.11

.35 .28

-.16

.00

-.14 -.15

.00 .00 .00

.10 .00 .17 .15

.00 .00 .67 .66

.00 .32

.59 .52

.00 .19 .31 .33 .00 .00 .00 .00

-.44 -.42

.18

.38 .33 .20 -.19 -.18 .00



25

CONCLUSIONS This cross-cultural examination of the structure of attitudes toward political issues yielded a number of interesting results. First, research in the United States revealed two large factors of attitudes toward political issues, similar to the Religiosity and Humanitarianism dimensions proposed by Ferguson (1939), which we interpreted as Moral Regulation versus Individual Freedom and as Compassion versus Competition. Research in Canada used many different political issues, but revealed the same two dimensions, and these factors were found to show largely isomorphic patterns of relations with the two main dimensions within the domains of social values, cultural variation, and general social and political ideologies. Based on our interpretations of these results, we developed two new scales to measure the Moral Regulation and Compassion ideological constructs that we judged to form the common basis for the two-dimensional spaces within these domains. We then investigated the structure of political issues in Wales and found two dimensions that were similar to the Moral Regulation and Compassion factors obtained in North America, despite additional differences in the specific issues involved. These factors correlated highly with the Moral Regulation and Compassion scales, thus supporting our interpretation of the psychological bases of the factors. Further research in Hong Kong also revealed two factors that resembled Moral Regulation and Compassion, although again the factors were defined, in part, by some culture-specific issues. Unfortunately, data from the Moral Regulation and Compassion scales were not obtained in Hong Kong. Finally, our investigation of the structure of political issues in Ghana failed to recover the Moral Regulation and Compassion dimensions. One of the Ghanaian factors somewhat resembled a mixture of Moral Regulation and Compassion. The other Ghanaian factor appeared to be a dimension of opposition to versus support for the policies of what was then the current government, independently of the specific content of those policies. Thus, the two political issues factors obtained in the United States were also observed in Canada, Wales, and Hong Kong, but were not recovered in Ghana. We have offered several possible explanations for why the findings obtained in Ghana did not conform to the structure of political attitudes obtained in the other countries. This suggests that, although the structure of political attitudes tends to be quite consistent across cultures, political and social variables may disrupt this structure.

Why Liberalism Versus Conservatism? Based on the findings from participants in most of the cultures that we studied, there seem to be at least two orthogonal, simple-structured factors in the domain of political issues. The question arises, then, as to why political attitudes are

26


generally perceived to fall along a single dimension of overall Liberalism-Conservatism. That is, why are the two largest dimensions of political issues generally combined into a one-dimensional political spectrum? Moreover, why does that political spectrum oppose, rather than combine, the independent dimensions of Moral Regulation and Compassion? We suggest two potential reasons. One possible explanation for the subjective importance of the overall Liberalism-Conservatism axis involves the long-term trend in the mean levels of the Moral Regulation and Compassion dimensions in many cultures. Throughout this century, there has been a trend favoring lower levels of Moral Regulation (e.g., decreased religious content in education, decreased legal restriction of sexual behavior) and higher levels of Compassion (e.g., government social programs, prohibition of racial discrimination), coincident with rising levels of wealth, mobility, education, and leisure. As a result of these tendencies, the major axis of political conflict has contrasted "liberals," who mainly approve of the overall trend and wish to accelerate it, with "conservatives," who mainly disapprove of the overall trend and wish to decelerate or reverse it. An interesting prediction that follows from this suggestion is that overall Liberalism-Conservatism would cease to be subjectively important if the long-run trends toward decreased Moral Regulation and increased Compassion were to "level off* as some equilibrium points were approached. That is, if the societal levels of the two dimensions begin to oscillate independently, then the left-right spectrum will be replaced by a two-dimensional classification, as Boski (1993) has suggested. This may already be occurring in the Canadian university student population, within which there was no evidence of an overall Liberalism -Conservatism dimension, even as a first unrelated factor. A second possible explanation for the subjective importance of the overall Liberalism-Conservatism axis involves the presence or absence of intergroup conflict. A society at war tends to be less compassionate, in the sense of committing acts of violence against the out-group, and more regulated, in the sense of regulating individuals' behavior for the benefit of the in-group. Individuals who favor the prosecution of the war will thus tend to adopt attitudes that are less humanitarian and more "religious" (or ideological, in the case of a non-religious ideology such as Nazism or Communism), even though many of those individuals might, in times of peace, not show this combination of attitudes. Conversely, individuals who oppose the prosecution of the war will show an opposite combination of attitudes, even if they might not show this combination of attitudes during peacetime. This explanation might be tested by comparing the structures of political attitudes within otherwise similar societies that have differed in terms of their recent experiences of warfare or of armed confrontation. According to this explanation, the Liberalism-Conservatism dimension would not be viewed as a particularly salient construct in societies that have faced little threat of war or other intergroup conflict. By pursuing this line of investigation, further


27

insight into the structure of political attitudes, and cross-cultural differences in such attitudes, would be obtained. Notes 1

An alternative approach to the study of this domain would be to factor analyze respondents' level of agreement with various political ideologies, rather than with policies pertaining to specific issues. This lexical approach was used by Saucier (2000), who identified "ism" terms from a dictionary (e.g., Antinomianism, Euhemerism, Fourierism, Marcionism, Pelagianism, Zoomorphism) and generated statements explaining each term, which were then used as items to be factor analyzed. We did not use this approach, for two reasons. First, we were not interested in investigating the factor structure of various social and political ideologies as proposed by philosophers, but rather in inferring the implicit ideologies that govern political attitudes more generally, by investigating factor structure of people's attitudes toward salient political issues. Second, we believe that the lexical approach to trait structure—although well suited to the domain of personality—is not necessarily suitable for studying the domain of political attitudes or ideologies, because very few of these variables are encoded in human languages as familiar, commonly used terms. Indeed, most of the terms used by Saucier (2000) are not used in everyday conversation, and participants in Saucier' s research were asked to provide ratings on simplified definitions of these terms, rather than on the terms themselves as is the case in lexical studies of personality structure.

References Altemeyer, B. (1981). Right-wing authoritarianism. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press. Altemeyer, B. (1988). Enemies of freedom: Understanding right-wing authoritarianism. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Altemeyer, B. (1996). The authoritarian specter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Boski, P. (1993). Socio-political value orientations among Poles in presidential '90 and parliamentary '91 elections. Polish Psychological Bulletin, 24, 151-170. Christie, R. (1956). Eysenck's treatment of the personality of communists. Psychological Bulletin, 53,411-430. Duckitt, J. (2000). Culture, personality, and prejudice. In S. A. Renshon & J. Duckitt (Eds.), Political psychology: Cultural and crossculturalfoundations (pp. 89-107). New York: New York University Press. Duckitt, J., Wagner, C., du Plessis, I., & Birum, I. (2002). The psychological bases of ideology and prejudice: Testing a dual process model. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83, 75-93.

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Ashton, Danso, Maio, Esses, Bond, Keung Eysenck, H. J. (1954). The psychology of politics. London: Routledge & Kegan

Paul Ltd. Eysenck, H. J. (1975). The structure of social attitudes. British Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 14, 323-331. Ferguson, L. W. (1939). Primary social attitudes. Journal of Psychology, 8, 217-223. Ferguson, L. W. (1942). The isolation and measurement of nationalism. Journal of Social Psychology, 76,215-228. Ferguson, L. W. (1973). Primary social attitudes of the 1960s and those of the 1930s. Psychological Reports, 35,655-664. Leung, K., Bond, M. H., de Carrasquel, S. R., Munoz, C., Hernandez, M, Murakami, F., Yamaguchi, S., Bierbrauer, G., & Singelis, T. M. (2002). Social axioms: The search for universal dimensions of social beliefs about how the world functions. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 33, 286-302. Maio, G. R., & Esses, V. M. (2001). The need for affect: Individual differences in the motivation to approach or avoid emotions. Journal of Personality, 69, 583-615. Maio, G. R., Roese, N. J., Seligman, C., & Katz, A. (1996). Rankings, ratings, and the measurement of values: evidence for the superior validity of ratings. Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 18, 171-181. McCrae, R. R., Zonderman, A. B., Costa, P. T. Jr., Bond, M. H., & Paunonen, S. V. (1996). Evaluating replicability of factors in the Revised NEO Personality Inventory: Confirmatory factor analysis versus Procrustes rotation. Journal ofPersonality and Social Psychology, 70, 552-566. Pratto, F., Sidanius, J., Stallworth, L. M., & Malle, B. F. (1994). Social Dominance Orientation: A personality variable predicting social and political attitudes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67, 741-763. Rokeach, M., & Hanley, C. (1956). Eysenck's tender-mindedness dimension: a critique. Psychological Bulletin, 53, 169-176. Saad, L. (1996). Issues referendum reveals populist leanings. The Gallup Poll Monthly, 368,2-6. Saucier, G. (2000). Isms and the structure of social attitudes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78, 366-385. Schwartz, S. H. (1992). Universals in the content and structure of values: theoretical advances and empirical tests in 20 countries. In M. P. Zanna (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology, Vol. 25 (pp. 1-65). Orlando, FL: Academic Press. Schwartz, S. H. (1994). Are there universal aspects in the structure and contents of human values? Journal of Social Issues, 50, 19-45. Schwartz, S. H. (1996). Value priorities and behavior: Applying a theory of integrated value systems. In C. Seligman, J. M. Olson, & M. P. Zanna (Eds.), The psychology of values: the Ontario symposium, Vol. 8 (pp. 1-24). Mahwah, NJ. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Schwartz, S. H., & Bilsky, W. (1987). Toward a universal psychological structure of human values. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 53, 550-562. Schwartz, S. H., & Sagiv, L. (1995). Identifying culture-specifics in the content and structure of values. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 26, 92-116.


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Singelis, T. M, Triandis, H. C., Bhawuk, D., & Gelfand, M. J. (1995). Horizontal and vertical dimensions of individualism and collectivism: A theoretical and measurement refinement. Cross-Cultural Research, 29, 240-215. Triandis, H. C. (1995). Individualism and collectivism. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Triandis, H. C., & Gelfand, M. J. (1998). Converging measurement of horizontal and vertical individualism and collectivism. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74, 118-128.

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Chapter 2

A Cultural-Psychological Model for Explaining Differences in Social Behavior: Positioning the Belief Construct Michael Harris Bond, Chinese University of Hong Kong

Every discovery, every enlargement of the understanding, begins as an imaginative preconception of what the truth might be. —Peter Medawar, Advice to a young scientist

I wish to use this opportunity to consolidate some recent thinking and apply its results to our emerging work on the construct of general social axioms. For the last thirty years I have been struggling intellectually to develop a framework by which culture, in its myriad ways, may be brought into a model for the study of social behavior. This focus on behavior is a sobering, infrequently applied but practical standard to use in the psychological study of culture. I believe that by foregrounding behavior, however, practitioners of our discipline will be prodded to consider currently neglected aspects of culture's pervasive reach. As psychologists, we presume that this reach is mediated through the agency of internal processes, called psychological mediators. I will describe one of these mediators, general social beliefs, and illustrate the role such a mediator may play in a fuller model for social behavior that accommodates culture.

31

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Bond

A Focus on Behavior In such business, action is eloquence. —Shakespeare, Coriolanus, Act 3, Sc. 2, L. 75 In their published work, cross-cultural social psychologists appear to be enraptured with the self in its various guises-the self-concept, its clarity, its categories, and its enhancement or effacement through social exchanges; group identities, emerging from the in-group/out-group distinction, but extending to the salient self-reflection of cultural groups in contact, viz., cultural identity. A second major trajectory of research is with social attitudes and with attributions made for both individual and inter-group behaviors, both internal psychological processes (see Smith & Bond, 1998, ch. 5 and 7). These emphases flow inevitably from the pre-eminence of Western social psychology in our discipline and its focus on social cognition, from the ability of educated samples in other places to complete symbolically complex questionnaires, and from the hypothesis-structuring provided by theory on collectivism as a fundamental dimension for organizing the study of culture (Triandis, 1994). It has also helped that the East Asian economic miracle of the 1970s provided a host of talented graduate students for North American graduate programs. These students provoked their advisors' curiosity about culture just at the time that culture was becoming a "academically correct" topic of interest. Most of these students were legatees of a Confucian heritage, which provides a striking contrast with Western cultural logic about social cognitions and behavior (Nakamura, 1964). When supported by data, such contrasts are newsworthy in our discipline, increasing our chances of publication, and bringing the topic of culture into the limelight. Inevitably, the seminal paper by Markus and Kitayama (1991), which integrated these emerging developments, has become a classic and one of the most widely cited papers in social psychology. There is an irony in such a focus on internal mental processes: the foremost theory of cultural collectivism asserted that external factors were more important than internal factors in shaping responses for allocentrics (i.e., those persons whose personality characteristics derive from a culture of collectivism; Triandis, 1994). There are many ways to identify collectivist and individualistic cultures, and all to date have assigned the Confucian nations of Japan, Taiwan and Korea to the collectivist, and Anglo nations, like the United States and Germany to the individualist. Acting consistently with the cultural logic and epistemology of individualism, however, Western psychologists privilege the concerns of the actor, not the presses of his or her social field in shaping that actor's responses. In consequence, most extant cross-cultural research comparing Asians and Westerners uses personality variables as the construct of choice in attempting to "unpackage" differences in outcomes across these cultural groups (see e.g.,

2. A Cultural-Psychological Model

33

Singelis, Bond, Sharkey, & Lai, 1999). Despite our frequent self-identification as social psychologists, we cross-culturalists rarely manipulate social context along with measuring personality when we examine the responses of persons from different cultures. In consequence, we perpetuate the "fundamental attribution error" in the very design of our studies. This Western focus on the "psychography of the actor" exemplifies the Western presumption that "behavior engulfs the field," that, "I think, therefore I am," and exercise my being-in-the-world through my thoughts. Even when social cognitions are compared, we know that Asians give relatively greater weight to the social field, such as social norms, characteristics of the others in the proximal situation, and features of the actor's relationship with these others (e.g., Kashima, Siegel, Tanaka, & Kashima, 1992). If we were to focus more on behavior in cross-cultural studies, would we better detect the influence of external, social factors and their relatively greater weight than internal factors for members of collectivist compared to individualistic cultures? Our recent work on the determinants of retaliatory responses to being hurt suggest that such a confirmation will be found if studies are designed accordingly (Lun et al., 2002). In that study, both Japanese and American actors verbally asserted themselves against another who had just harmed them as a function of their internal motivation to retaliate. Additionally, the respondents' familiarity with the harmdoer, a relationship factor, influenced their assertiveness, with familiar others receiving more. The weight of this relationship factor, however, was relatively greater in shaping Japanese assertiveness than American, just as collectivism theory would predict. As this study demonstrates, as the theory of cultural collectivism implies, and as the discipline of social psychology requires, we should be including social along with personal variables in designing our cross-cultural research. At very least, more frequent inclusion of social variables in our designs would enable us to develop a more comprehensive model for social behavior and then to assess its universality (see e.g., recent work by Branzei, Vertinsky, & Camp, 2003)?

Paying the Piper There is a practical consideration to this sharpened focus on behavior. Cross-cultural social psychology is relevant to the practice of international business persons, governmental negotiators, working teams composed of culturally diverse members, immigrant communities and their members, struggling to accommodate to alien cultural, social, legal, and institutional environments. Our work is financed, however indirectly, by such stakeholders. I often wonder what we are giving them in usable return by our continued explorations of the mind's labyrinth (Bond, 2003).

34

Bond

Social living is .the vortex in which such practical enterprises succeed or fail. In social exchanges, we can only put speech and other observable behaviors into play for use by our fellow interactants. Actions, not mental processes, are the fodder for coordinated interaction both within and across cultural lines. In assessing our range of cross-cultural studies to date (Smith & Bond, 1998), I am led to conclude that we know lots about cultural influences on various social cognitions, but far too little about cultural influences on action. In consequence, we have little to contribute towards cross-cultural training programs, and are in danger of being sidelined by our stakeholders. Trainers need to know about rules of action, role-related scripts, norms of etiquette and the like, since they are more proximal to behavior in lay theories of action and are trainable in a way that personality processes are not. A vigorous focus on outcomes and the full range of factors leading to those outcomes would be salutary for our discipline, and I expect for the caliber of our theorizing about how culture operates. A Model for the Operation of Culture in Human Social Life The emphasis on culture as difference overlooks the fact that the capacity to inhabit a culturally organized environment is the universal species-specific of homo sapiens. —Michael Cole, Cultural psychology: A once and future discipline Culture is an intimidating concept to manage as a social scientist; it is so multifaceted, and its lines of insinuation into the process of person-making and interaction-structuring so potentially multiple. Our honeymoon phase where we treated culture as a categorical variable is now finished, however. We have shown that culture matters (Bond, 1988a). Now we must begin analyzing cultures in psychologically relevant ways. This relevance may be demonstrated by showing that some feature of a cultural system relates to a psychological characteristic of its culture members, typically defined in terms of the average score of a culture group's members on the psychological variable of interest. This culture feature would exercise this general psychological impact by directing and structuring the socialization process in mundane, repeated ways (Vygotsky, 1978). This shared socialization process would then shape the psychological outcomes of interest, be they internal constructs or processes leading to observable behaviors. There would be latitude for variation in the distribution of these constructs or processes within a cultural group's members arising from biological variations across its population and different levels of success in socialization attempts by society's agents. I offer the following psychological definition of culture as consistent with this strategy for approaching our task. Psychologically, culture is:


35

A shared system of beliefs (what is true), values (what is important), expectations, especially about scripted behavioral sequences, and behavior meanings (what is implied by engaging in a given action) developed by a group over time to provide the requirements of communal life (food and water, protection against the elements, security, belonging, social appreciation, and the exercise of one's skills) in a particular geographical niche. This shared system enhances communication of meaning and coordination of actions among a culture's members by reducing uncertainty and anxiety through making its member's behavior predictable, understandable, acceptable and valuable. (Adapted from Bond, 2004)

By this definition, a culture becomes a shared, historical creation-withinconstraints offering a number of variants beneath its overarching umbrella. Each local community, even family system, each school, even classroom, each work place, even work group, each religion, even religious community, practicing within that cultural group constitutes a proximal social environment whose reinforcement structure is guided by the ambient culture in which it is enmeshed. Broadly, an individual's psychological characteristics will be shaped by his or her hereditary attributes interacting with the proximal reinforcement contingencies operating over the person's time of engagement with those micro-systems embedded within that cultural system. We know very little about the operation of the proximal micro-systems that constitute and sustain and reproduce and redefine a culture-which aspects of the micro-systems influence which psychological characteristics of the actors who function within them. Cross-cultural psychologists have tended to focus instead on the "big" picture, examining, for example, the broad influence of modes of subsistence on psychological differentiation assessed in mature members of that subsistence system with its various institutions of socialization (Berry, 1979). Or, cross-culturalists like Markus and Kitayama (1991) have explored the impact of "a collectivist cultural orientation," loosely defined, on a host of social psychological constructs manifested in the responses of mature members of various collectivist cultural systems. These projects were important beginnings, as they presented a case for the Mainstream of culturally innocent psychologists to answer. We must now analyze the concept of culture into those institutional components of a cultural system responsible for socializing its members to function within it. I offer the following visual model as consistent with this strategy for approaching our task: (see Figure 2.1). This model is a heuristic, designed to focus attention on the specific aspects of our enterprise while keeping the full sweep of our cross-cultural work in view. Moving from the left, we begin with the societal context, differentiated in terms of the various institutional functions

36

Bond

deemed relevant in shaping the psychological software of the citizens of that cultural group. Contemporary practice often operationalizes "culture" in terms of nations, a practice that makes sense in that national institutions may occasionally be the proximal institutions guiding local socialization. This is the case in smaller states like Singapore, but may not be so relevant in scattered polities, like the Philippines, or for larger nations, like Russia. There, the reinforcement contingencies characterizing local institutions will be freer to vary from one community to the other. It is possibly in this regard that Sawyer's (1967)

Figure 2.1 A heuristic model to explain cross-cultural differences in levels of individual behavior. Adapted from Smith and Bond, 2004.


37

identification of size as a basic dimension of national difference becomes important for the study of behavior. Nevertheless, the national boundaries will delineate the line within which broader policies and institutions exercise their influences over proximal environments sustaining interaction. These institutions translate tradition into the normative structure regulating the social exchanges involved in society's basic functions-training the next generation to produce material and cultural products, protecting itself from deviant groups and members who may destroy the social order required for these productions, and ensuring the society's survival from external depredations, like colonization in its many guises. Familial, educational, legal, enforcement, political and religious institutions are developed to achieve these ends. These basic institutions shape the psychological software of the citizens who function within them by rewarding and punishing member performances. Any given institutional function may take many forms. Politically, "democracy" may be structured in various ways, with Sawyer's (1967) analysis reminding us that political orientation is a basic axis of national difference; economic systems take many forms, as do the distribution of resources they structure and the labor practices that restrain them; educational systems and their practices differ (see e.g., Stevenson & Lee, 1996), along with their curriculum content, delivery formats, and the languages in which they are conducted. Legal codes of nations differ in the range of activities covered, the density of lawyers trained to practice the law, their modes of enforcement, their punitiveness, the degree of access for those ruled by the law to assistance in using the law and defending themselves against its application, procedures for extracting and presenting evidence, and the importance of the police relative to the judiciary in influencing verdicts. Historical legacies are probably also important, especially the history of recent domestic political-ethnic violence, the recency and outcomes of external warfare (Ember & Ember, 1994), political change, and natural disasters. Early socialization occurs in the family, with parents varying in their knowledge, ability and willingness to prepare their offspring to play both basic and specialized roles within this complex system of forces-at-work. As cross-cultural social scientists, we desperately need useable metrics to help us extract patterns of relationship from these various axes of socialization. As Georgas and Berry (1995) have reminded us, the currently available indices are mostly economic and political; we have fewer legal, educational, historical and religious dimensions at our disposal. This poverty of resource arises in part because we have lacked the inspiration or intuition that these avenues of variation have discernable impacts upon individual human functioning. Many cross-cultural psychologists avoid these societal factors because they are too distal to behavior, too loose in their connectibility to human behavior, and too demanding to operationalize. Furthermore, there is no theory to guide the investigator to the relevant aspects of the phenomenon that one needs to measure. Rare exceptions

38

Bond

to this lack of theoretical and operational attention are slowly emerging, (e.g., Vandello & Cohen, 2002), but we need more such promising demonstrations. Cross-cultural psychologists more typically approach their task by focusing on the middle section of the above model, viz., with studying the psychological software or mediators. Much of this work has involved the slavish importation of instruments to assess psychological constructs developed to address theories originating elsewhere and hence liable to the challenge of intellectual imperialism (see e.g., Yang, 1986). Other, especially more recent, work has been multi-culturally sensitive, often theorizing, operationalizing and instrumenting their constructs in creative ways (see e.g., Cohen, this volume; Ji, this volume; Kitayama, this volume; Peng, this volume). More is needed. Especially important will be the measurement of these psychological constructs in ways that allow us to compare their strength within and across cultural groups. Bond (19885) did so with the construct of values, describing the average endorsement of "social integration" and of "reputation" in equivalent samples from 22 nations. The strength of this value complex in a population may then be related to the institutional features of a social system, so as to illuminate possible avenues of their socialization (see e.g., Bond, 1991). Additionally, these mediators may be used to "unpackage" the very behavioral differences whose observation by a cross-cultural psychologist may have led to intuiting and developing the mediator in the first place (Bond, 1997). So, for example, much of our current fascination with self-effacement (see Heine, this volume) emerged from observations of verbal exchanges in Asian-North American interactions. Wierzbica, for example, has identified a "Chinese modesty script," using her basic lexicon to characterize the social drivers underlying verbal responses to praise: I can't say something like this to other people: "I did something good" "I think something good about me"

"It is good if people think that I don't think good things about me" (Wierzbica, 1996, p. 25) In some of the exchanges arising from this socialized script, the actor is deflecting an enhancing verbal attribution from another. It is easy to "internalize" this behavior by assuming that it is driven by a personality disposition labelled "self-effacement," and then instrument this personality characteristic. But is "self-effacement" the operative variable responsible for the observed praise-deflection? Other internal variables, like harmony (Cheung et al., 2001) or social dominance orientation (Sidanius, 1993) may be responsible; perhaps an external variable, like dyadic hierarchy (McAuley, Bond, & Kashima, 2002), is


39

also responsible. These possibilities can only be resolved, however, if we extend our focus to observable behavior as a litmus test. The right hand side of the model identifies such an outcome as a legitimate and appropriate element of interest in addressing the mandate for cross-cultural social psychology.

Beliefs as Culturally Derived, Psychological Software It had the power to drive me out of my conception of existence, out of that shelter each of us makes for himself to creep under in moments of danger, as a tortoise withdraws within its shell. For a moment 1 had a view of a world that seemed to wear a vast and dismal aspect of disorder, while, in truth, thanks to our unwearied efforts, it is as sunny an arrangement of small conveniences as the mind can conceive. —Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

Societal Investments Psychological software may be construed as social capital, i.e., the investment through socialization in creating functional processing predispositions and routines for its citizens to use in navigating a demanding social and physical world. What constitutes "capital" depends in part on the eco-biosocial context confronting the social system in achieving the basic societal goals of security and prosperity—economic, social and cultural. That context can include internal divisions between groups constituting the polity, as in Sri Lanka and Nepal, as well as divisions between the nation and the international community, an emerging issue as the world increases in its interdependence. From this perspective, the relative levels of psychological mediators across citizens of various nations and between citizens of various groups within a given nation offer revealing insights into the societal issues they confront, and the "capital" whose development they must foster. It was this sort of logic that guided McClelland's (1961) work on "the achieving society." In that project, achievement themes were assessed from children's primary school readers and related to the previous and current levels of economic development of their nation. McClelland was not measuring the level of achievement motivation in comparable samples of citizens from various countries, but rather tapping the levels of achievement motivation presented to these future citizens symbolically through the textbooks used in an educational context. That research would connect to the model proposed here as a mapping of the socialization influences channeled through early educational institutions.

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Bond

Those influences would in turn shape the psychological software of the students in primary school. The consequently higher or lower levels of achievement motivation and other associated dispositions would then be extended into other societal arenas, inspiring further education, guiding career choices and voting patterns, or even voting itself, increasing the time spent on economic tasks, and so forth. All of these undertakings would be broadly functional within the given national group. Psychological Dispositions as Capital McClelland (1961) was assessing one societal agent of socialization-readers provided to students in primary school. Presumably,. a steady infusion of achievement emphases from educational and other institutional sources would then suffuse the social system with symbolic and interpersonal encouragement for the development of a citizenry strong in achievement-orientation. That outcome could be measured by comparing the strength of achievement motivation across comparable populations of citizens from various nations. One could argue that the 36 citizen scores on conscientiousness in McCrae's (2002) cross-cultural study of the Big Five provides just this psychological positioning. Bond's (1988) comparison of citizen's values in 22 countries on the dimension of "reputation" may also map the same relative emphasis on achievement. There are many issues a given society must confront, most of them requiring trade-offs. Schwartz (1994) listed these broad antimonies as: autonomy versus conservation, and hierarchy and mastery versus egalitarian commitment and harmony with nature. A society's goals may be represented by its position in this two-dimensional array of desired outcomes. Creating social capital then involves socializing citizens towards that level of value orientation, self-construal, emotion regulation, intellectual skill set, literacy, interpersonal efficacies and the like required to attain these national goals. Historical legacies will conduce toward current societal circumstances that press for relatively higher or lower levels of these various psychological dispositions in its citizens (see e.g., Wong & Bond, 2003). Fukuyama's (1995) analysis of trust levels citizens hold towards one another and their government as arising from institutional socialization for efficient economic production follows just this sort of logic regarding the creation of social capital. This component of social capital is invested into the psychological software of a society's citizenry. The Psychological Construct of Belief Beliefs are cognitive constructions about the linkages between categories. As Katz (1960) put it, a belief is a "description and perception of an object, its characteristics, and its relationship with other objects" (p. 165). Beliefs express


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the assessed relationship of association and causality among elements in the physical, psychological, social and spiritual universe. How a person believes these domains of the world to function will influence how she or he behaves by providing considerations to be made before acting and by altering the probable reinforcement contingencies for acting itself as well as for the type of action undertaken. Beliefs about the world will additionally enable the social actor to make sense of the outcomes of her or his actions, the actions of others, and of impersonal events, indeed whether the event is impersonal or not, guiding how she or he will respond to those occurrences. Beliefs vary along a continuum of specificity, varying from particular, domain-focused knowledge to general axioms about how the world functions. All persons learn particular expectancies as they develop functional competence in bounded domains (e.g., if car engine oil is changed every 5000 km, its engine will last longer; routine distribution of lecture notes to students improves one's teaching ratings, etc). In contrast, general social axioms are pitched at a higher level of abstraction, and apply across a variety of situations. In developing a measure for these beliefs (Leung et al., 2002), we scanned proverbs, media descriptions, interview protocols, and established psychological inventories, such as Rotter's (1966) generalized expectancies for internal-external locus of control, for such broadly applicable belief statements. Our goal was to identify dimensions of general social axioms that would be cross-culturally applicable while being culturally comprehensive. To that end, our original belief scale was developed from intensive cultural mining in two ostensibly different cultures, Hong Kong Cantonese Chinese and Venezuelan. The resulting beliefs were assembled and obvious repetitions were dropped from the group. Any domain-specific beliefs were also dropped. The resulting 182 axioms were then administered to citizens and university students of both Hong Kong and Venezuela. Culture-specific cluster and factor analysis suggested five main grouping of beliefs. These dimensions were then identified in university students of three additional national groups, Americans, Japanese, and Germans, by using confirmatory factor analysis. Leung et al. (2002) label and describe these five dimensions thus: Factor 1 is labelled Social Cynicism, because the items represent a negative view of human nature, a biased view against some groups of people, a mistrust of social institutions, and a disregard of ethical means for achieving an end. Factor 2 is labelled Social Complexify, because the items in this factor suggest that there are no rigid rules, but rather multiple ways of achieving a given outcome, and that inconsistency in human behavior is common.

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Bond Factor 3 is labelled Reward for Application, because the items represent a general belief that effort, knowledge, and careful planning will lead to positive results. Factor 4 is labelled Spirituality (now Religiosity—see Leung & Bond, 2004), because the items refer to the existence of supernatural forces and the beneficial functions of religious belief. Factor 5 is labelled Fate Control, because the items represent a belief that life events are pre-determined and that there are some ways for people to influence these outcomes, (p. 292)

On the basis of this work in five national groups, a shorter, 60-item Social Axioms Survey (SAS) was compiled for use in subsequent extensions of this work into other cultural traditions by other social scientists. This survey has now been administered to gender-balanced samples of university students in 36 nations. A pan-cultural factor analysis has identified these same five dimensions of belief, with only a few changes in their item composition compared to the composition presented in Leung et al. (2002). These culture-general definer items may then be used to derive a belief profile for citizens in any of the constituent 36 nations. University students from the largest ethnic group or from an ethnically balanced sample serve as a surrogate for a random sample of the citizenry, giving a first approximation of the citizen profile for that nation. So for example, and using a simple 5-point scale from disagree to agree, Canadians may be characterized as very low in Cynicism (2.70), very high in Social Complexity (4.17), average in Reward for Application (3.70), low in Spirituality (3.10), and very low on Fate Control (2.43). Rotating the matrix of citizen scores, one can select a dimension, such as Reward for Application, and note that Malaysians (4.30), Indians (4.17), and Indonesians (4.15) profess greatest belief; Czechs (3.30), Italians (3.22), and Dutch (3.09), the lowest. Parallel profilings are possible for the other four dimensions.

Beliefs as Part of a Society's Social Capital Bordieu (1986) argued that, "It is impossible to account for the structure and functioning of the social world unless one re-introduces capital in all its forms and not solely in the one form recognized by economic theory" (p. 242). I propose that the profile of beliefs characterizing a nation's citizenry constitutes an aspect of its social capital. Other modal personality attributes do the same. By way of illustration, our ongoing research indicates that all five dimensions of belief relate to a nation's affluence. In more affluent nations, the average citizen is less cynical, endorses higher social complexity, believes less in reward for application, and rejects fate control and spirituality more. Affluence is a composite set of economic variables, produced by factor analyzing a number of


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socio-political-economic indicators (Georgas, Van de Vijver, & Berry, 2004), and may be used as a marker of a nation's economic modernity. Does this belief profile thus indicate the general cognitive orientation that is functional for the efficient running professionally complex, technologically sophisticated, service-oriented economies? Lower cynicism would seem to reflect the trust that Fukuyama (1995) posits as essential for engaging producers into a contractual nexus; belief in higher social complexity would seem to reflect the greater cognitive differentiation arising from secular systems of education leading to a high level of professionalization; lower belief in reward for application would seem to reflect a reduced sense of personal self-efficacy relative to other factors responsible for producing any outcome in more developed, complex and inter-related economies; lower belief in fate control and lower spirituality would both seem to reflect the epistemological impact of scientism of contemporary belief systems (Owen, 1952). Some of the belief dimensions have other, additional societal predictors, and for most of the five dimensions of belief there are predictors that explain greater variance in citizens' belief than does affluence. There are thus additional and non-economic considerations served by beliefs in a nation's citizenry, and a complete analysis of beliefs as social capital must assess these other functions served by this component of the psychological software. This is a brief, post-hoc attempt to explore the possible social functionality of citizens' beliefs, but is consistent with Yang's (1988) argument for the specific functionality of certain psychological dispositions in the modernization process. Constellations of societal forces press for the socialization of certain psychological predispositions to certain levels. Once realized, these dispositions become social capital in the sense that they orient a nation's citizenry in a way compatible with maintaining and extending its current means of economic production and social relations.

Beliefs as Mediators of Behavior How do these five dimensions of belief guide behavior? Provisionally, we construe beliefs as cognitions that structure outcome expectancies for actions by the actor. These expectancies are based upon assumptions about why and how the world operates, where the referent for "world" includes material, social, impersonal and spiritual considerations. These assumptions are the distillate of each individual's lifetime of considered transactions with the world, and depict the world as "true-for-him" or "true-for-her." It is each person's roadmap for living. So, for example, an individual endorsing a high level of cynicism generally expects his or her outcomes to be negative, and believes that others are motivated to achieve power for themselves and dominance over others, thereby setting the attributional stage for competitive interactions between those persons. Other dimensions of belief may be similarly analyzed in terms of the expectancies they potentiate.

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These actor expectancies interact with his or her goals, values, or motivations to orient behavior in a basic expectancy-value framework (Feather, 1988), such that goals propose and expectations dispose. Cultural socialization impacts on this process by acting as an "incubator" for both the goal strengths and the belief strengths of its citizens. Schwartz' (1992) work on values provides a comprehensive, metrically equivalent, individual-level approach to comparing goal strengths; Leung et al.'s (2002) work on beliefs provides a comprehensive, metrically equivalent, individual-level approach to comparing belief strengths. Cross-cultural differences in observed behaviors may then be predicted and explained by reference to the relative average strengths of goals or beliefs or both in the cultures involved (see e.g., Leung, Bond, & Schwartz, 1995). Or not. It is a sobering possibility worth our disciplinary attention in social psychology that observed differences in behavior across cultures are a function of different role demands, rather than of psychological variables. Culture exercises its impact not only on citizen levels on given psychological variables but also for role issues (Sarbin & Allen, 1968), such as the positioning of given role dyads within a four-dimensional role space (McAuley et al., 2002). These role dyads may have different normative expectations attached to their instantiation, and these varying norms may account for observed behavioral differences across cultures. Again, this theoretical possibility is consistent with the logic of collectivism developed by Triandis (1994) that, in collective cultural systems, social factors exercise relatively greater weight than do internal factors. This reasoning does not deny that the level of given internal factors will vary as a function of our respondents' culture. We have seen these differences in citizen profiles for beliefs above; it has also been found for values (Bond, 1988), and for big five personality dimensions (McCrae, 2002); more, such as general self-efficacy (Scholz, Dona, Sud, & Schwartzer, 2002) and other more specific efficacies arising out of Bandura's (2001) recent elaborations of social cognitive theory. It is probable, however, that these internal dispositions, whatever their level, will be less powerful in determining the behavior of allocentrics as opposed to idiocentrics. Proving that to be the case requires the inclusion of both internal, psychological variables and external, social variables in our cross-cultural research designs. We are currently addressing this paradigm for research by incorporating beliefs in a model of behavioral mediation as affected by cultural variation of the participants. The ideal study involves the manipulation and measurement of psychological variables, like belief strength along one of the five pan-cultural dimensions, along with social variables, like the gender of the other, characteristics of the interactants' role dyadic relationship, the achieved communion level of their relationship (Tarn & Bond, 2002), the perceived norms operating in the situation and so forth across at least two cultural groups. This procedure will allow us to disentangle the impact of psychological and social


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factors on behavior, and determine whether cultural differences can be thereby unpackaged. Even if no average differences emerge across cultural groups, a model for behavior can be tested for its general applicability across cultures. This procedure will take us closer to developing universal models for social behavior (see e.g., Lun et al., 2002). It is the development of such scientifically defensible models that this essay has been designed to promote. Not everything that a man knoweth, Can be disclosed; Nor can everything that a man can disclose Be regarded as timely; Nor can every timely utterance be regarded as suited to the capacity of those -who might hear it.

—Baha'u'llah, Gleanings References Baha'u'llah (1956). Gleaningsfrom the writings of Baha 'u 'llah. Wilmette, IL: Baha'I Publishing Trust. Bandura, A. (2001). Social cognitive theory: An agentic perspective. Annual Review of Psychology, 52, 193-209. Berry, J. W. (1979). A cultural ecology of social behavior. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 12, pp. 177-206). New York: Academic Press. Bond, M. H. (Ed.). (1988a). The cross-cultural challenge to social psychology. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Bond, M. H. (1988b). Finding universal dimensions of individual variation in multi-cultural studies of value. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 55, 1009-1015. Bond, M. H. (1991). Chinese values and health: A cross-cultural examination. Psychology and Health: An International Journal, 5, 137-152. Bond, M. H. (1997). Preface: The psychology of working at the interface of cultures. In M. H. Bond (Ed.), Working at the interface of cultures: 18 lives in social science (pp. xi-xix). London: Routledge. Bond, M. H. (2003). Cross-cultural social psychology and the real world of culturally diverse teams and dyads. In D. Tjosvold & K. Leung, (Eds.), Cross-cultural management (pp. 43-58). Aldershot, England: Ashgate. Bond, M. H. (2004). Culture and aggression-From context to coercion. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 8(1), 62-78. Bourdieu, P. (1986). The forms of capital. In J. E. Richardson (Ed.), Handbook of theory of researchfor the sociology of education (pp. 241 -258). New York: Greenword. Branzei, O., Vertinsky, I., & Camp, R. (2003). Initial trust in collaborations within and across cultures: The role of formal and informal assurances in Canada and Japan. Working paper, International Business Trade and Finance Series of The Faculty of Commerce, The University of British Columbia.

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Cheung, F. M., Leung, K., Zhang, J. X., Sun, H. F., Gan, Y. Q., Song, W. Z., & Xie, D. (2001). Indigenous Chinese personality constructs: Is the five-factor model complete? Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 32, 407-433. Cole, M. (1996). Cultural psychology: A once and future discipline. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Conrad, J. (1900). Lord Jim. New York: Doubleday. Ember, C. R., & Ember, M. (1994). War, socialization, and interpersonal violence: A cross-cultural study. Journal of Conflict Resolution, 38, 620-646. Feather, N. T. (1988). From values to actions: Recent applications of the expectancy value model. Australian Journal of Psychology, 40, 105-24. Fukuyama, F. (1995). Trust: The social virtues and the creation of prosperity. New York: Free Press. Georgas, J., & Berry, J. W. (1995). An ecocultural taxonomy for cross-cultural psychology, Cross-Cultural Research, 29, 12-57. Georgas, J., Van de Vijver, F. J. R., & Berry, J. W. (2004). Ecosocial indicators and psychological variables in cross-cultural research. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 35, 74-96. Kashima, Y., Siegal, M., Tanaka, K., & Kashima, E. S. (1992). Do people believe behaviours are consistent with attitudes? Towards a cultural psychology of attribution processes. British Journal of Social Psychology, 31, 111-24. Katz, D. (1960). The functional approach to the study of attitudes. Public Opinion Quarterly, 24,163-204. Leung, K.& Bond, M. H. (2004). Social axioms: A model of social beliefs in multicultural perspective. In M.P. Zanna (Ed.), Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, (Vol. 34, pp. 119-197). San Diego, CA: Academic Press. Leung, K., Bond, M. H., de Carrasquel, S. H., Mufioz, C., M., Hernandez, M., Murakami, F., Yamaguchi, S., Bierbrauer, G., & Singelis, T. M. (2002). Social axioms: The search for universal dimensions of general beliefs about how the world functions. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 33,286-302. Leung, K., Bond, M. H., & Schwartz, S. H. (1995). How to explain cross-cultural differences: Values, valences, and expectancies? Asian Journal of Psychology, 1, 70-75. Lun, V., Chow, H., Bond, M. H., Quigley, B., Ohbuchi, K., Mummendey, A., & Tedeschi, J. T. (in preparation). Understanding responses to being hurt by another: A four-culture comparison. Unpublished manuscript, Chinese University of Hong Kong. Markus, H., & Kitayama, S. (1991). Culture and the self: Implications for cognition, motivation, and emotion. Psychological Review, 98, 224-253. McAuley, P., Bond, M. H., & Kashima, E. (2002). Towards defining situations objectively: A culture-level analysis of role dyads in Hong Kong and Australia. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 33, 363-380. McCrae, R. R. (2002). NEO-PI-R data from 36 cultures: Further intercultural comparisons. In A. J. Marsella, R. R. McCrae, & J. Allik (Eds.), The five-factor modeI across cultures (pp. 105-125). Amsterdam, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers. McClelland, D. (1961). The achieving society. New York: Van Nostrand. Medawar, P. B. (1979). Advice to a young scientist. New York: Basic Books. Nakamura, H. (1964). Ways of thinking of Eastern peoples: China-Tibet-Japan. Honolulu, HI: University Press of Hawaii.


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Owen, D. R. G. (1952). Scientism, man and religion. Philadelphia, PA: Westminster. Rotter, J. B. (1966). Generalized expectancies for internal versus external control of reinforcement. Psychological Monographs, 80, 1-28. Sarbin, T. R., & Allen, V. L. (1968). Role theory. In G. Lindzey, & E. Aronson (Eds.), Handbook of social psychology (2nd ed., Vol. 1, pp. 488-567). Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Sawyer, J. (1967). Dimensions of nations: Size, wealth, and politics. American Journal of Sociology, 73, 145-172. Scholz, U., Dona, B.-G., Sud, S., & Schwartzer, R. (2002). Is general self-efficacy a universal construct? Psychometric findings from 25 countries. European Journal of Psychological Assessment, 18 ,242-251. Schwartz, S. H. (1992). The universal content and structure of values: Theoretical advances and empirical tests in 20 countries. In M. Zanna (Ed.), Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (vol. 25, pp. 1-65). New York: Academic Press. Schwartz, S. H. (1994). Beyond individualism/collectivism: New dimensions of values. In U. Kim, H. C. Triandis, C. Kagitfibasi, S. C. Choi, & G. Yoon, (Eds.), Individualism and collectivism: Theory, application and methods (pp. 85-119). Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Sidanius, J. (1993). The psychology of group conflict and the dynamics of oppression: A social dominance perspective. In W. McGuire & S. lyengar (Eds.), Current approaches to political psychology (pp. 183-219). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Singelis, T. M., Bond, M. H., Sharkey, W. F., & Lai, C. S. Y. (1999). Unpackaging culture's influence on self-esteem and embarrassability: The role of self-construals. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 30, 315-341. Smith, P. B., & Bond, M. H. (1998). Social psychology across cultures (2nd ed.). London: Prentice Hall International (also 1999, Needham Heights, MA: Allyn & Bacon). Smith, P. B., & Bond, M. H. (2004). Honoring culture scientifically when doing social psychology. In M.A. Hogg & J. Cooper (Eds.), Sage handbook of social psychology (pp. 43-61). London: Sage. Stevenson, H. W., & Lee, S. Y. (1996). The academic achievement of Chinese students. In M. H. Bond (Ed.), The handbook of Chinese psychology (po. 124-142). Hong Kong: Oxford. Tarn, B. K. Y., & Bond, M. H. (2002). Interpersonal behaviors and friendship in a Chinese culture. Asian Journal of Social Psychology, 5, 63-74. Triandis, H. C. (1994). Theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of collectivism, hi U. Kim, H. C. Triandis, C. Kagit9ibasi, S. C. Choi, & G. Yoon (Eds.), Individualism and collectivism: Theory, application and methods (pp. 41-51). Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Vandello, J. & Cohen, D. (in press). Cultural themes associated with domestic violence against women: A cross-cultural analysis. Manuscript submitted for publication. Wierzbicka, A. (1996). Contrastive sociolinguistics and the theory of "cultural scripts ": Chinese vs. English. Unpublished manuscript, Australian National University.

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Wong, S. W., & Bond, M. H. (2003). Socializing emotionality: A study of emotional length, recency and intensity across the citizens of 30 nations. Manuscript submitted for publication. Yang, K. S. (1986). Chinese personality and its change. In M. H. Bond (Ed.), The psychology of the Chinese people (pp. 106-170). Hong Kong: Oxford University Press. Yang, K. S. (1988). Will societal modernization eventually eliminate cross-cultural psychological differences? In M. H. Bond (Ed.), The cross-cultural challenge to social psychology (pp. 48-66). Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

Chapter 3

Insider and Outsider Perspectives on the Self and Social World Dov Cohen, University of Illinois Etsuko Hoshino-Browne, Swarthmare College

One of the fundamental problems people face involves accurately perceiving and assessing what is actually happening in the world surrounding them. That is, people often have difficulty in separating out what is "out there" in the world and what is going on in other people's heads from their own perceptual and phenomenological experiences. In some version or another, this problem has concerned philosophers of mind as well as psychologists across the range of the discipline. Thus, for example, phenomena such as egocentric thinking in children and adults, development of a theory of mind, the phenomenon of projection, ego-boundaries, and naive realism in perception and cognition have received much attention from psychologists. As people develop, they get over their crudest forms of egocentrism. Thus, obviously at some point relatively early in their development, human beings learn that other people have minds and that others don't literally see the same things they do (as shown in Piaget's famous three mountains task; Piaget & Inhelder, 1956), don't know the same things that they know (as illustrated in various false belief tasks—e.g., Huffman, Perner, & Parkin, 1999), and don't understand the world in the same way they do (as illustrated, for example, by various perspective taking tasks—e.g., Selman, 1977). However, even when people get over these ways of thinking in their crudest form, they are vulnerable to slipping into these earlier ways of thinking throughout their lives (Gilovich, Kruger, & Savitsky, 1999). They see the world through their own eyes, their own phenomenology dominates, and they get fundamentally confused between what is in their own head, what's in other people's heads, and what is really "out there" in the world. In such cases, it's as if people experience their world from the inside-out.

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Many have assumed that this is the nature of human cognition. People's own phenomenology is so salient that they must go through some sort of process of anchoring and adjustment to perceive the world. Errors come about because the anchor of people's own experience is so strong and the adjustment away is so little (Gilovich, Medvec, & Savitsky, 1998; Kruger, 1999). However, we argue in this chapter that this "inside out" tendency, whereby people view the world too much through their own eyes, is one culturally patterned type of human experience. There is another culturally patterned type of human experience-one more likely found in East Asia-that shows a very different tendency. For reasons that will be elaborated on shortly, it may be that East Asians are more likely to get out of their own heads, see things in ways that are less contaminated by their own internal phenomenology, and experience themselves from an "outsider's" perspective. Thus, compared to the "inside out" tendency among Westerners, Easterners may have the "outside in" tendency. In this chapter, we provide evidence that Easterners and Westerners experience the self and the world in some fundamentally different ways that are not simply metaphorical but that show up in their memory imagery, on line imagery, perceptions of other people, and characterizations of the world. In the conclusion, we argue that phenomenology and ideology are probably causally related (i.e., that macro-level cultural ideologies give rise to and also arise from micro-level phenomenological experiences at the individual level).

The Self and the Spectator Immediately, it is important to note that there is large within-culture variation and strong cross-cultural similarities (Vandello & Cohen, 1999). People in both Eastern and Western cultures can and do perceive the world in both an "inside out" and "outside in" way. In terms of the "outside in" perspective, scholars of the West (e.g., Cooley, 1970/1902; Mead, 1934; Smith, 1759/1984) have discussed the way individuals often look at themselves from the vantage point of the "generalized other" or the "impartial spectator." The capability to do so is the mark of socialization into a society, and this ability to distance oneself from the self and take the perspective of the other is a fundamental mechanism for self-control. Smith (1759/1984) argued: We suppose ourselves the spectators of our own behaviour, and endeavour to imagine what effect it would, in this light, produce upon us. This is the only looking-glass by which we can, in some measure, with the eyes of other people, scrutinize the propriety of our own conduct, (p. 112)

3. Insider and Outsider Perspectives

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And Mead (1934) argued that "it is in the form of the generalized other.. .that the community exercises control over the conduct of its individual members" (p. 155). The "generalized other" phenomena are important for Easterners and Westerners, who are both very capable of experiencing themselves as either the subject or the object (Cohen, 2003). However, there is also good reason to believe that people from different cultures may differ in their default tendencies to experience the self either as subject or object, because of the way social norms are structured in these cultures. Most relevant in this case is the way the West has been described as having an individualistic culture with relatively "loose" social norms whereas the East has been described as having a collectivistic culture with "tight" social norms that emphasize social harmony. Such harmony comes from the ability to control one's behavior, regulate and adjust oneself to the context, and generally conduct oneself in ways that are considered appropriate (Morling, Kitayama, & Miyamoto, 2002). In the case of East Asia, tight social rules that specify behavior prescribe norms that must be strictly adhered to in order to maintain this harmony.1 Describing Japan, Heine, Lehman, Markus, and Kitayama (1999) have written about the crucial importance of living up to other people's expectations. There are consensual standards for behavior that one must measure oneself against. They observed: Japanese are encouraged to identify socially shared images of the ideal person associated with their positions defined by age, gender, and roles. Parents and educators alike encourage children to become 'rashii' to such images. 'Rashii' means 'similar to' or 'prototypical of.... In contrast to North American culture, in which an assortment of relevant practices and lay theories are grounded in the assumption that there are a variety of ways to be an ideal child, Japanese culture appears to be based on the assumption that there is one widely shared standard that should be met to be a good child, (p. 771)2 The important thing is to (a) meet these social standards and (b) keep up with the group. More generally, Heine et al. (1999) argued that "an external frame of reference leads Japanese to have a heightened awareness of their audience... In this way, rather than being seen as subjects, they may more aptly be viewed as imagined objects in the eyes of others" (p. 773). These sorts of phenomena are not restricted to East Asia. However, they may be an especially important part of cultures where the Confucian tradition is strong. Weber (1951), in writing about China, discusses the central role of propriety and the way it demands a great deal of circumspection from an individual. In Confucian thought, the "noble" man is "both inwardly and in

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relation to society harmonically attuned and poised in all social situations, be they high or low" (p. 156). In pursuit of this ideal, Weber noted, "we find watchful self-control, self-observation, and reserve" (p. 156). Again, it is not that these ways of being are peculiar to the East, as can be seen in research in the West on objective self-awareness, public self-consciousness, or self-objectification theory (e.g., Baldwin & Holmes, 1987; Duval & Wicklund, 1972; Fredrickson, Roberts, Noll, Quinn, & Twenge, 1998; Framing & Carver, 1981; Mass, 1984). It is just that routinized practices and habits may facilitate greater overall tendencies toward taking an outsider perspective on the self in the East. In language, for example, Kitayama and Markus (1999) note that in Japan: When talking to someone of a lower status, a person will take the perspective of the other person and call the self from that perspective ... When referring to herself in front of her own baby, a mother has to call herself "the mother" (e.g. "The mother really loves you"). Likewise, elementary school teachers refer to themselves as "the teacher" in front of their pupils (e.g. "The teacher is very happy!"), (p. 271) (In our own data on European-Canadian and Asian-Canadian mothers, we have also found that the majority of Asian-Canadian mothers do this third person referencing of the self, and they are in fact two to three times more likely to do so than their European-Canadian counterparts (Smith & Cohen, 2003)). The tendency to speak of the self from the third person perspective is not simply a linguistic convention, but can reflect a real felt experience of an outsider's perspective on the self. Such an outsider's perspective has obvious advantages, if a person wants to be circumspect of his or her own behavior or is trying to co-ordinate and adjust to other people. One of the dangers of not being able to get out of one's own head is the sort of egocentric phenomena by which one's own feelings, thoughts, and agendas come to color both (a) what the individual thinks is out there in reality and (b) what the individual thinks others are thinking. Focussing outward rather than inward seems, on balance, a somewhat better strategy if a person is trying to fit in with others in social situations.3 In the studies that follow, we tried to examine the insider and outsider perspectives among Asian-Canadians and European-Canadians using a number of different tasks. The first three studies had tasks that illustrated the way Asian-Canadians (compared to European-Canadians) are more likely to take a third person perspective on themselves and hold stronger representations of how the "generalized other" or the "impartial spectator" would be looking at them. The next three studies concern the way Asian-Canadians may consequentially be less


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susceptible to some of the egocentric biases exhibited by European-Canadians. A tendency of European-Canadians to be anchored too deeply in their own phenomenological experience will result in confusing what is in their own head with what is out there in reality (Study 4) and with what is in other people's heads (Studies 5 and 6). The final study is a developmental study that concerns how children learn to characterize the world. In particular, we examined whether they learn to characterize it in terms of other people's behaviors that they can see with their own eyes or whether they move past the immediately observable and characterize the world in terms of the internal emotions that other people might feel. Overall, these studies illustrate the general theme of European-Canadians and Asian-Canadians experiencing the world in some fundamentally different ways-one from the "inside out" and the other from the "outside in" perspective. Importantly, the function of taking the viewpoint of the "impartial spectator" or trying to enter into another's perspective is primarily social, driven by the desire to produce harmony, gain approval, and so on. This way of experiencing the self and the world is called into practice when other people (real or sometimes imagined) are involved. Thus, we would not expect these types of phenomena to occur in all situations. Rather, this sort of experiencing of the world should be particularly evoked by social circumstances where circumspection is called for. Throughout the studies below, the pattern is such that whereas cultural differences are strongest when social situations or representations are invoked, the differences disappear for the most part when nonsocial situations are involved. Finally, before getting into the particulars of the following studies, it is important to again re-state that these insider and outsider perspectives are used by both Easterners and Westerners, but that we are looking for default tendencies that occur in certain types of situations. Further, the default mode of the outsider perspective is not peculiar to Easterners. As Michael Morris has noted (personal communication, June 23, 2002), this sort of split-consciousness that comes from the outsider perspective has also been described as part of the Black experience in the United States. W. E. B. Dubois (1903/1999) in The Souls of Black Folk mote of the "second-sight" of Blacks in the U.S., living in a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness-an American, a Negro, (pp. 10-11) More generally, we think the outsider mode in which one habitually looks at the self through the eyes of others is found in many types of cultural niches

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(Cohen, 2001): Where there are tight-knit communities that cherish modesty and interpersonal harmony, where a minority finds itself surrounded by a hostile culture and must remain circumspect, in deeply religious communities where God is always watching, in very hierarchical societies where people find themselves at the bottom of the social ladder and dependent on the good graces of those above, and in many other places, there may be an outsider default mode for people in that culture. In this chapter, we talk about European-Canadians and Asian-Canadians because the contrast provides one (very simplified) comparison between cultures with different defaults for insider versus outsider perspectives. However, just because these groups provide one example does not mean they are the only example. A more general theory is needed for understanding cultural variation on this dimension (as well as many others), but that is well beyond the scope of this chapter.

A Note on Participants Another issue that is of great importance but that is rarely dealt with is the issue of sampling. That is, a researcher takes two samples (usually convenience samples) and then generalizes widely to two populations. For example, a sample of students in Beijing, China will come to represent a billion Chinese, a greater number of "East Asians," or an even greater number of "Asians" or "NonWesterners." Conversely, a sample of (usually introductory psychology) students from one or two campuses in the United States will come to represent 275 million U.S. residents, a greater number of North Americans, or an even greater number of Westerners. One strategy in this case is to do what the sociologists or political scientists do-that is, use probability sampling to draw inferences about the populations being studied.4 This was impractical in our studies (as well as in most psychology studies). Therefore, in these experiments we attempted to match the two samples as closely as possible, with the exception of the cultural difference of interest. Matched (university student) samples in two countries (e.g., students in Beijing vs. students in Toronto) would usually provide for more powerful differences between two groups, whereas matched samples drawn from the same (university) population (e.g., Asian-Canadians in Toronto vs. EuropeanCanadians in Toronto) should permit more experimental control by lessening pre-existing differences between groups that one may or may not want to consider cultural (e.g., economic differences, linguistic differences, differences in modes of experimental administration, educational and achievement differences, etc.). The following studies used Asian-Canadian students (who were bora in East Asia) at the University of Waterloo in Canada and European-Canadian students (bora in North America) at the University of Waterloo. This leaves an unanswered question of how representative of East Asian culture the


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Asian-Canadian students at Waterloo are and how representative of Western culture the European-Canadian students are. Furthermore, it ignores the immense variability within Asian culture and within North American culture (Cohen, 2001; Vandello & Cohen, 1999). When we say Asians and Euros below, we are using these group labels as a shorthand way of saying Asian-Canadian and EuropeanCanadian students at the University of Waterloo. We think differences between them plausibly relate to more broad East-West differences that have been described by other scholars. Yet generalization is always shaky and the results must be taken with caution when inferences are made to broader populations.

EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE The Generalized Other's Perspective Mead (1934) and Smith (1759/1984) were making the case for the "generalized other" and the "impartial spectator" for all persons, though presumably mostly based on experience from Western populations. The contention here is that what they argued based on Western experiences is even truer of the East, where self-observation in the service of propriety is more essential. In Study 1, we looked at the phenomenon of projection. Most theories of projection describe the way one's own emotions get projected onto others (e.g., an angry person sees anger in others; a sad person sees sadness in others). However, this classical or egocentric projection may hold more for Westerners than for Easterners. Among Easterners, a different sort of projection may hold. In Study 1, we explored the way that Asians are more likely to habitually represent the generalized other and then project how that generalized other would see them. Whereas we expected Euros to egocentrically project their own emotions onto others, we expected Asians to engage in relational projection, thus projecting their representation of how the generalized other would look at them. In Studies 2 and 3, we took a closer look at the phenomenon of the outsider's perspective on the self. We examined how frequently Asians (vs. Euros) took an outsider's perspective on themselves in the phenomenological imagery of memory and on-line experience. When people speak of a person taking the perspective of others, it is not always clear how literally they mean it-whether they mean it as a metaphor or as an actual lived experience of split consciousness. The imagery of a dream is one place where some people report a phenomenological experience of seeing themselves, but there are other occasions as well. In memories, for example, Nigro and Neisser (1983) have described field and observer memories, or what might be called first and third person memories. That is, first person memories are the sorts of memories where one's mental imagery is constructed from what one saw (or thinks one saw) at the time. Third person memories are memories where the imagery is constructed from an observer's

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perspective. That is, the imagery of the memory would reflect what other people saw or what a camera positioned in the room would have seen. In these sorts of memories, one would see oneself in the memory as part of the scene. In Study 2, we examined this issue by looking at cultural differences in the sorts of memories Euros and Asians had. Then, in Study 3, we went from memory imagery to the imagery of people's on-line experience.

Study 1: Projecting the Generalized Other If Asians were more likely than Euros to take a generalized other's perspective on themselves, it would be interesting to examine how this tendency might manifest itself in interpersonal emotional perception. Specifically, we were interested in contrasting two possible types of projection. Classical or egocentric projection involves a process of taking one's own emotions and projecting them onto another. Thus, an angry person projects anger onto another, for example. However, if Asians are habitually representing the generalized other in their heads and taking an outsider's perspective on the self, one might expect them to show a different sort of projection. That is, one might expect them to show relational or complementary projection, in which they project the emotion that the generalized other would have in looking at them onto another person. Thus, a person who felt shame would project a feeling of contempt onto another person, as shame implies that others are looking at you or would look at you with contempt. Certain emotions are complements in that they tend to go together in pairs in social interaction. If one person feels an emotion X, another is likely to feel an emotion Y. Thus, in addition to shame and contempt, fear and anger are complements as are sadness and sympathy. One is fearful when another is angry; and when one is angry, another better be fearful. One is sympathetic when another is sad; and when one is sad, one expects another to be sympathetic. In Study 1, we examined tendencies toward egocentric versus relational projection by inducing an emotion in participants and then seeing what emotion they projected onto a series of faces. The participants were a subsection of those who participated in Study 2 on memories (Cohen & Gunz, 2002). Thus, consistent with the memory cover story given in Study 2, they were asked to write in vivid detail about a time when they had either felt fearful, angry, ashamed of themselves, contemptuous of another, sad, or sympathetic toward another person (this was a between-subjects manipulation). Writing about the memory, however, served as our mood induction procedure; after completing their stories, participants were told that we also needed them to rate some photographs for an unrelated study. They were to rate each face in the photograph for how much of each type of emotion it displayed. For conditions that induced an emotion X, each participant's egocentric projection score was the amount of emotion X the participant saw across all the pictures, whereas each participant's relational


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projection score was the total amount of complementary emotion Y he or she saw in the pictures. For example, the egocentric projection score for a participant induced to feel contempt would be the average contempt rating and the relational projection score would be the average shame rating for the faces. As shown in Figure 3.1, Euros and Asians showed very different forms of projective biases. Consistent with an inside-out view of the world, Euros projected whatever they were feeling onto the faces (i.e., egocentric projection). And consistent with a salient and habitual representation of the generalized other, Asians projected onto the faces the feelings that the generalized other or another person would have in looking at them (i.e., relational/complementary projection). They experienced the faces as angry if they felt afraid, sympathetic if they felt sad, contemptuous if they felt ashamed, and vice versa. Judgments of both Euros and Asians were affected by their own emotions, but the Euros projected it outward, whereas the Asians used it to imagine how others were looking at them. Figure 3.1 Egocentric and relational projection for European-Canadians and Asian-Canadians.

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The tendency to look at oneself from the outside may be manifested not just through relational projection of emotions, but also through a felt experience of split consciousness. Nigro and Neisser's (1983) distinction between the phenomenology of first and third person memories captures this nicely.

Study 2: First and Third Person Memory Imagery In Nigro and Neisser's (1983) original procedure, they simply asked respondents to recollect different occasions and then classify them as first or third person memories. We followed their procedure with two exceptions. First, we added two situations where the participant would be the focus of others' attentions (being embarrassed and having a conversation with a friend). And second, we allowed participants to rate their memories on a scale from 1 (completely first person) to 11 (completely third person), because people often indicate that their memories are a mixture of both. A greater tendency for Asians to have third person memories may not be shown across the board. Rather, if, as Heine, Lehman, Markus, and Kitayama (1999) have contended, this tendency to have an external frame of reference is driven by the desire to fit in, to meet others' expectations, and to avoid standing out, then it should be the case that the need for circumspection is greatest when one would be at the center of attention in a scene. Thus, in this experiment, we expected that Asians would be more likely than Euros to have third person memories, particularly for the sorts of situations where they would be at the center of other people's attention. Of the ten situations we asked about, five involved times when the participants would be at the center of the scene, such as giving an individual presentation, demonstrating a skilled act to a child or friend, and the like. The other five involved times when the participant would not be the focus of others' attentions, such as when the participant was watching news on television or running for exercise. The predicted interaction of Culture by Type of Situation emerged. Asian participants were more likely to have third person memories when they were at the center of a scene both in comparison to Euros and in comparison to other memories the Asians had. This interaction held also when controlling for the vividness of the memory, the emotion involved in the memory, and its distance in the past. Unexpectedly, Asians were more likely than Euros to have first person memories when they were not at the center of the scene. This finding was not predicted, but one could speculate that in situations involving less self-scrutiny, Asians could be more likely than Euros to harmonize with their environment and lose self-consciousness (Weber, 1951).


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Study 3: On-line Imagery Memories are constructed, and thus it is probably relatively easy to rearrange first person experiences into a re-constructed third person memory. However, third person (observer) imagery in memory also has its parallels in on-line experiences or real time experiences that create a sort of split-consciousness. In fact, Nigro and Neisser (1983) suggest that some third person memories may directly derive from such third person experiencing. They speculated that "it is also possible to have observer experiences. Both of us (the authors) can attest to the possibility of experiencing events from a 'detached' perspective as they occur. In such instances we are conscious of how the entire scene would appear (or does appear in fact) to an onlooker who sees us as well as our surroundings. It is not clear how these experiences are best interpreted-whether as a nonegocentric form of direct perception in Gibson's (1979) sense or as the products of instantaneous reconstruction-but it is clear they exist" (pp. 468-469). In this third study, we examined the imagery of such real-time or on-line experience to see if it also paralleled what was found in the memory data. Smith (1759/1984) and Mead (1934) originally argued that representing the "generalized other" or the "impartial spectator" is especially important for exercising self-control. For Smith, restraining one's impulses was a matter of assuming the perspective of the impartial spectator and imagining how he or she would view one's conduct. Thus, in this study, we examined on-line imagery, that is, the instantaneous and real time experience of taking a third person perspective on oneself, during a task that demanded self-control and restraint of impulses. In this case, our self-control task was a pain endurance task that was billed as a test of participants' mental toughness. In line with the memory data and the theoretical argument about the "outside-in" perspective arising from social situations, we expected on-line experiencing of the "outsider" perspective to be invoked when social representations were made salient to the participant. Thus, prior to the pain endurance task, we gave participants either an individualism prime or a collectivism prime. We also had a control condition, in which participants did not receive any prime. The prediction was that when others were made salient through the collectivism prime, Asians would be more likely than Euros to report on-line experiences of third person imagery as they endured the pain. They would report coping with the pain by adopting the perspective of a detached observer looking at them. Participants in either the individualism or collectivism prime condition were given different instructions for coming to the experiment. Participants were told that they needed to bring a picture with only themselves in it (individualism prime) or a picture with them and their family in it (collectivism prime) as part of the experiment. When they came to the lab, the experimenter explained that the

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picture would help participants think and write an essay about their own special uniqueness (individualism prime) or about being a "good son or good daughter" (collectivism prime). In the no prime condition, participants were not given such instructions. After participants were primed (or not), they were informed they would be given a pain endurance task as a test of mental toughness. A bar with a weight of approximately 565g was to be applied to the middle part of the middle finger of their non-dominant hand, and they were to keep their finger under this weight for as long as possible, indicating to the experimenter when the pain was too much for them. The task was framed so that enduring the pain was a matter of will or self-control rather than physical sensitivity. When participants indicated the trial was over (or when a maximum of 10 minutes was reached), the weight was removed from the participant's finger and he or she was given the Cognitive Coping Strategy Inventory (Butler, Damarin, Beaulieu, Schwebel, & Thorn, 1989). The Cognitive Coping Strategy Inventory (CCSI) is a series of 70 questions that ask about various techniques for enduring pain, and participants were told to indicate how they coped with the pain they had just experienced during the task. A subsection of questions on the CCSI was of particular interest because it dealt with using a detached, outsider perspective for coping with pain (e.g., "I might attempt to imagine myself leaving my body and observing my pain in an impartial, detached manner"). As expected, the people most likely to use this detachment strategy were the Asians in the collectivism prime condition. Asians were unlikely to use this strategy in the absence of a prime or in the individualism prime condition. However, once others were made salient to them through the family portrait and writing the essay about being a good son or daughter, they were more likely to report having coped with the pain through adopting an outsider's perspective on the self during their on-line, real-time experience of the task. When others were made salient, Asians viewed themselves as a detached observer would have as they tried to control their pain. Euros, on the other hand, rarely used this detachment strategy under any condition.

Egocentric Biases in Understanding Others and the World Studies I through 3 illustrated the ways European-Canadians were more likely to take an "inside out" view of themselves and the world, whereas Asian-Canadians were more likely to experience themselves from the "outside in," taking another's perspective on the self. This tendency to flip perspectives and get outside their own heads may mean that Asian-Canadians are less susceptible to some of the egocentric biases that Euro-Canadians experience. The phenomenology of their own experience for Euros so colors their perceptions of everything else that there becomes a fundamental confusion between what's in their own heads, what's in


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other people's heads, and what's out there in reality. If one is more driven to attend to the external world, less anchored in one's own phenomenological experience, and more likely to get outside oneself, then it would seem that Asians should be less susceptible to some of these egocentric biases. The different ways of experiencing the self mean that Asians would be less likely to fall into these phenomenological, egocentric biases that are "fundamental" to human information processing.

Study 4: Confusing What's in My Head With What's Out There The ease of confusing what's in one's own head with what's out there in reality was vividly illustrated in a clever study by Newton (1990). This simple experiment had participants tap out a song by rapping their knuckles against a desk and then guessing how likely it was that another person could figure out the song they were tapping. The tappers massively overestimated how likely their audience was to figure out what they were tapping. On average, the tappers guessed their audience could figure the song out 50 percent of the time, whereas the audience's actual rate of correct identification of the songs was 2.5 percent. The error conies, as Griffin and Ross (1991) argue, because as participants tap out the song, they know exactly what song they are tapping and thus "hear" the song fully orchestrated and with all the instruments in their head. Thus, the error derives from participants attending to the full-blown song in their own minds, rather than the impoverished stimulus out there in the world that the other person is hearing (see Figure 3.2). If one's attention is more centered on the external world, however, it may be that Asian-Canadians are less likely to experience this confusion between the internal representation in their head and the tapping of the knuckles that the other person can hear. This external focus should make them more attentive to objective reality and more able to discern what songs will or will not be picked up by observers. Attending to the objective reality "out there" means that one is attending to the simple, impoverished beat. Concentrating on this beat means that one will be better able to tell which rhythms are distinctive and easy to guess versus which will be hard to guess. For example, the beat of "Help" by the Beatles is distinctive and should be relatively easy to recognize; whereas the beat of Sinatra's "My Way" is similar to and likely to be confused with the beat of Britney Spears' "Oops!... I did it again," at least for the untrained ear. On the other hand, if one attends not to the impoverished beat that is "out there" but instead to the idiosyncratic representation in one's head-complete with guitars, singing, and additional orchestration-one is likely to be less accurate about what the naive listener will or won't detect. For example, Spears' "Oops" song and Sinatra's "My Way" will sound completely different if one attends to the songs in one's head that

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Cohen, Hoshino-Browne Rgure 3.2 Schematic representation of the stimuli "out there" in reality vs. inside one's own head for Study 4.

have either Frank versus Britney's voice, orchestras versus synthesizers, and so forth. (Any accompanying differences in visualisation would, needless to say, make matters worse). Note that a cognitive load manipulation might produce interesting consequences, depending on what the person is attending to. If the attention is on the objective tapping, the cognitive load will detract from one's ability to listen to the rhythm; and as a result, one's ability to guess what an observer can pick up will be diminished. If the attention is on the (misleading) idiosyncratic representation in one's own head, the cognitive load will detract from one's ability to concentrate on that; and as a result, one's ability to guess what an observer can pick up may actually improve. Thus, cognitive load should make Asians less accurate in their guesses and Euros more accurate in their guesses.


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Our experiment was run modifying Newton's (1990) procedure slightly. First, our participants did not tap the song themselves, but rather the two participants listened to tapping made by a computer. Also, we used ten songs in our experiment that were pre-tested as equally identifiable to Asians and Euros and that differed greatly in their rhythms and the recognizability of those rhythms (e.g., Happy Birthday and O Canada). Participants first listened to the actual, fully orchestrated songs to confirm that they knew each song. Then, participants paired off as they listened to the computer-tapped rhythms. For each pair of participants, Partner A was given a list of the songs in the order they were tapped, whereas Partner B simply listened to the tapping sounds and had to guess the song. For Partner As, we manipulated cognitive load by having half of them remember an 8 digit number. The dependent measure was Partner A's accuracy in figuring out which songs B could guess. As predicted, we obtained a significant Culture by Cognitive Load interaction. Under normal conditions without cognitive load, Asians were relatively more likely than Euros to be accurate in guessing which songs were detected, presumably because the Asians were attending to the external stimulus whereas the Euros were thrown off by their own internal representation of the song in their head. However, once cognitive load was introduced, Asians became less accurate and Euros actually became more accurate-presumably because the default attention to the objective tapping was disturbed among Asians and the default attention to one's own idiosyncratic representations was disturbed among Euros.

Study 5: Confusing What's in My Head With What's in Your Head: Private Experience and Empathy-as-Projection The previous study illustrated one way that Euros are more likely than Asians to fall prey to their own phenomenology and mistake what is in their own head with what is "out there" in objective reality. Studies 5 and 6 extend this point further by illustrating how Euros are also susceptible to mistaking what is in their own head with what is in other people's head-an egocentric bias that Asians should be less susceptible to. Thus, Asians should not only be less likely to confuse what's in their own head with what's out there in reality, but they should also be less likely to confuse what's in their own head with what is in other people's heads. In two very interesting papers, Gilovich, Medvec, and Savitsky (1998) and Vorauer and Ross (1999) have described the "illusion of transparency" or the "failure to suppress the self' in which people behave as if their own internal experience is on display and can be read by others. Importantly, such biases seem to come from people's insider access to their private phenomenological experience. Both Gilovich et al. and Vorauer and Ross have shown that participants' own private self-consciousness (as measured by Feningstein, Scheier,

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& Buss, 1975) is correlated with the incidence of these biases. That is, the more individuals are attentive to their own thoughts, feelings, and physiology, the more they think these are on display and transparent for others to see. However, in cultures where people habitually take the "outsider's perspective" on themselves, this relation between private self-consciousness and feelings of transparency may not hold. Asian culture often requires an individual to suppress his or her personal desires and conform for the sake of group harmony (e.g., Markus & Kitayama, 1991; Triandis, 1989, 1996). If a person privately thinks or feels X, he or she may have to suppress this and publicly express Y for others' sake. In this cultural context, being attentive to both what one privately feels and what one is publicly expressing makes very salient the disjunction between what is felt internally and what can be seen by others. Thus, for Asians, we would expect the reverse of what happens with Euros. With Euros, more attention to internal states (i.e., more private self-consciousness) leads to a greater belief that the self is out there for all to see. With Asians, however, more attention to internal states leads to greater realization of the disjunction between feeling and appearing and less of the egocentric "illusion of transparency." In Study 5, we modified the procedure used in the Gilovich et al. (1998) study. In our study, participants were paired off and both partners were given the same pair of statements (e.g., "describe your favorite book and why you like it" or "describe the place you'd most want to go on vacation and why").5 There were six rounds of trials and each round consisted of two statements. Thus, for each round, Partner A was randomly assigned to tell the truth to one of these statements and to tell a lie to the other statement. Partner B had the same pair of statements, and she was also randomly assigned to tell the truth to one statement and lie to the other when it was her turn. The person listening to the statements had to guess which one was the lie, and the person making the statements had to guess how likely he or she was to get caught lying. The "illusion of transparency" was calculated across the six rounds as the participant's guess about whether he or she would be caught, controlling for the partner's actual accuracy. We obtained the predicted Culture by Private Self-consciousness interaction. Habitually focusing on one's internal state correlated positively with illusions of transparency for Euros, whereas habitually attending to personal thoughts and feelings led Asians to realize there is often a disjunction between what is felt and what others can see. In short, private self-consciousness led to relatively more illusion of transparency for Euros and less of such illusion for Asians. Interestingly, there were also differences in the ability to detect lies. A measure of empathy (Davis, 1980) was also included in this study. As one might expect, the more empathic Asians were, the more accurate they were in detecting which statement of the two was true and which one was a lie. For Euros, empathy did not correlate at all with accuracy. Instead, for Euros, empathy correlated with


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projection. That is, empathy correlated with a tendency for Euros to egocentrically project their own discomfort with a given statement onto the other person. A participant's own unease with a topic, such as "describe your favorite book," made her think that her partner was also telling a lie on this topic. In this very crude sort of projection, the more empathic Euros were, the more they thought their partner told a lie on the same topic that they themselves did. If anything, this crude form of projection—what I'm uncomfortable with, you must be uncomfortable with, too—was something that unempathic Asians did.

Figure 3.3 Types of projections in the group discussion task.

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Study 6: Empathy and Projection in a Group Setting Study 6 (done with Alison Luby) followed up the previous study by examining the projection-as-empathy finding in the context of a group discussion. Instead of a paired off sequence of lying and truth telling, participants in Study 6 came into the lab and had a three-person discussion in which they needed to come to a consensus about which of two hypothetical drugs to market. After the discussion, participants then filled out brief rating forms for (a) how much they liked each participant and (b) how much they thought each participant liked each of the other participants. Two types of projection were possible in this study (see Figure 3.3). A person can engage in a form of reciprocal projection—If I feel warmly toward X, I think X feels warmly toward me. And a person can also engage in projection onto another of her own attitude toward a third party—If I feel warmly toward C, I think B also feels warmly toward C. In fact, empathy was correlated with both forms of projection for Euros. For Asians, on the other hand, if anything, both types of projection were something that unempathic Asians did. The Culture by Empathy interaction was significant in predicting both reciprocal projection and projection of one's attitude toward a third party. That empathy and projection are correlated for Euros can give us some insight as to the process of what's happening. Euros are literally putting themselves in another person's shoes. Rather than trying to see things through the other person's eyes, they are thinking about themselves when trying to understand the other person. The American Heritage Dictionary (Morris, 1982, p. 449) defines empathy as "(1) identification with and understanding of another's situation, feelings, and motives; (2) the attribution of one's own feelings to an object." The second definition represents what might be called projective empathy in which people try to understand another by imagining "how would I feel in their situation?" The first definition represents what might be called other-centered empathy in which people try to understand where the other person is coming from and how things look to them in their situation (e.g., "how does that person feel in their situation?"). Empirically, an intriguing set of studies by Davis and his colleagues (Davis et al., 2003) also supports the distinction between these two types of empathy in terms of the sorts of cognitions elicited by each. To our knowledge, projective and other-centered empathy are both covered by the one English word "empathy," though these different types of "empathies" seem like related but qualitatively different processes.6 As Nickerson (1999) pointed out, projective empathy is often not a bad strategy if one is trying to understand another. However, it does lead to some ironic outcomes in circumstances such as those in Studies 5 and 6. That is, I project myself onto you, then I come to feel that I know and understand you because—surprise—you are just like me!


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Study 7: Characterizing the World: A Developmental Study The final study concerns how children learn to characterize the world, based either on what they can see or on their understanding of what other people are thinking and feeling (Lillard & Flavell, 1990). The issue of characterization has been seen as quite fundamental and basic by several researchers.7 There are often multiple ways of perceiving and describing situations, and initially characterizing things one way or another can produce a "set" for understanding that has consequences for our subsequent thinking, as different assumptions and knowledge structures get invoked based on this initial understanding. In this study (done with Tanya Smith), we examined characterization of scenes in terms of whether they are best described with respect to (a) the observable behaviors of a target person or (b) the internal, unobservable cognitive and emotional states of that target person. The prediction was that for Asians (more so than for Euros) development should entail a transition from the first to the second. That is, for Asian children, as they develop, scenes should be characterized less in terms of observable behaviors that the children can see with their own eyes and more in terms of other people's internal subjective states. The practice of getting outside one's own head, going beyond what is immediately observable to the self, and trying to enter into another person's mental experience is something that Asian children in particular should show a strong developmental trend for. In this study, we had elementary school participants (age 5 to 12) look at pictures, and for each one they were asked about the best way to describe this scene to a friend. Two alternatives were given. One was based strictly on a target's observable behavior (e.g., the man is playing with the baby). The other was based on a target's internal experience (e.g., the man is happy with the baby). Both characterizations are, of course, incomplete. In the first the man is playing with the baby but it's not clear whether he is bored, happy, or sad. In the second, the man is known to be happy with the baby, but it's not clear whether he is playing with the baby, cuddling, or simply looking at the baby from a distance. Thus, the choice represents what the participant feels is most salient or best characterizes the scene. We added a set of pictures to some drawings taken from Lillard and Flavell (1990). Some of these pictures were social/interactional, and some were solitary in that they only had a central actor by himself or herself. We predicted that Asians would show a greater developmental trend than Euros away from what is directly observable with their own eyes and toward entering into another's perspective through characterizing the scene by the target's internal state. This trend should particularly be apparent in social/interactional situations, because those are the situations that most activate the need to get out of one's own head and see things through another's perspective.

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As expected, we obtained the predicted Age by Culture interaction for the social/interactional pictures. As they got older, Asian children became more likely to describe the pictures in terms of a target's emotional state. The trend was not simply smaller for Euro children-in this study, it was nonexistent. Importantly, this Age by Culture interaction did not occur for pictures that were nonsocial, implying that the effect was not simply driven by a response set or some sort of linguistic convention. (As a result, the three-way interaction of Age by Culture by Social/Nonsocial picture was significant). The developmental trend toward entering into another's perspective was evoked specifically by pictures of social situations that called for one to concentrate on what people were thinking and feeling below the surface. One can imagine that this issue about characterization of scenes would become extremely important as one examines how events are remembered or how stories and information are communicated from person to person. As described earlier, the choice of characterization implies some loss of information that may be difficult to retrieve after being left out (e.g., simply describing that the man is happy with the boy leaves out, for example, that they were playing baseball together, or saying that the man was walking with the boy leaves out, for instance, that he was angry with the boy). Memory involves an intrapersonal reconstruction of events, and communication involves an interpersonal reconstruction of events. If the initial characterization lays down the memory trace in terms of either behaviors or emotions, this can color the way the story will be subsequently recalled by the self or the way it will be subsequently told to others. In further retellings, the process may be repeated like a game of "telephone," and soon the stories may take their culturally appropriate form as narratives either of observable action or of complex emotional events that happen below the surface. Each type of story is instructive and important both in its content and in what it teaches. For the listener, hearing a story described in terms of overt actions or underlying emotions implies that this is the central part of what is going on. The narrative not only tells the listener what the behavior or the emotion was, it tells the listener that the behavior or the emotion was what the situation was all about. Following a scene as it has to be characterized and re-characterized from one person to another would be interesting both for examining communication and for understanding metacommunication norms, as people learn what sorts of details and information they are supposed to be focusing on and communicating about.

Conclusion In summary, we argued that Asian-Canadians and European-Canadians tend to have different phenomenological perspectives on the self. Asian-Canadians have a greater tendency than European-Canadians to get out of their own heads in the imagery of their memories and their on-line experiences. European-Canadians


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show less of a tendency to take an outsider's perspective on themselves. In fact, Euros have great difficulty separating out their own insider experiences both from what's objectively out there in the world and from what's in other people's heads. When they project, Euros are more likely to project their own emotions and experiences, whereas Asians are likely to project onto others what the "generalized other" would think or feel in looking at them. Finally, as they get older, European-Canadian and Asian-Canadian children learn to characterize the world in very different ways, with Euro children describing scenes in terms of what is observable to them and Asian children describing scenes by entering into another's perspective and understanding the underlying emotions of the target person. Easterners and Westerners have different ideologies but they also live different phenomenologies (see Figure 3.4). The felt experience for people in the two groups can be quite different. And we suspect that ideology and phenomenology are causally related and probably mutually sustaining. Having a collectivist or individualist ideology predisposes one to take either an outsider or Figure 3.4 The hypothesized bi-directional relationship between cultural ideology and micro-level phenomenology.

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an insider perspective on oneself and the world. And the causal direction probably runs the other way as well. The lived phenomenological experiences in the two cultures probably help perpetuate their respective cultural ideologies. For collectivists, frequent experiences of seeing oneself in memory as an outsider would, of using third person imagery online in self-control situations, and of habitually representing the generalized other probably sustain a belief system where one thinks of oneself as part of a collective and feels watched and watched over by other people. For individualists, the opposite would be true. The lack of experience in looking at oneself as an outsider would, the relative inattention to other people's internal states, the confusion of what's in one's own head with what's "out there" in reality, and the tendency to project our own beliefs and feelings onto others would lead to the unself-conscious certitude, assertiveness, and self-confidence that are attributes of one of the ideal North American types. As illustrated in Figure 3.4, we think that within a culture there is reciprocal causation between felt experience and ideology or belief systems. Further research that manipulates felt experience (such as memory or on-line experience) and examines its effect on ideology or that manipulates ideology and examines the effect on phenomenological experience would make this point more concretely. Relevant to this, very interesting work by Heine (this volume) illustrates that putting Westerners in front of a mirror makes them look like Japanese in terms of attitudes toward the self, whereas the mirror has no effect on Japanese. Thus, giving Westerners the outsider perspective makes them resemble the Japanese, who presumably are already taking this outsider's perspective. The work suggests that the experience of looking (or not looking) at oneself from the outside contributes importantly to the type of self one constructs, both habitually and in given situations. We suspect that further work manipulating experience can also produce effects (at least temporarily) on the sort of individualistic versus collectivistic belief system one professes. Conversely, we expect that manipulations of individualistic versus collectivistic ideology (such as those done by Gardner, Gabriel, & Lee, 1999; Hong, Morris, Chiu, & Bend-Martinez, 2000; Kuehnen & Oyserman, 2002; Trafimow, Triandis, & Goto, 1991; Oishi, Wyer, & Colcombe, 2000) should also affect the sorts of perceptions, characterizations, and projections described above. (For another interesting discussion, see van Baaren, Horgan, Dijkmans, & Chartrand, 2004, who showed that priming context dependent thinking can induce behavioral mimicry and also that behavioral mimicry can induce context dependent thinking). In a famous essay, the philosopher Thomas Nagel (1974) asked, "What is it like to be a bat?" Nagel's essay was an anti-reductionist argument making the case that it would be impossible for philosophers and scientists to say they have understood consciousness without coming to grips with its subjective nature. Even if scientists understood and could explain all the biology, it feels a certain way


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to be a bat or to be a human, and any description of consciousness would be incomplete without incorporating these feelings (these "qualia" of experience). In a similar way, it's important to understand the qualia of being an individualist or a collectivist. Scripts, norms, attitudes, values, and the like are absolutely essential for describing cultural differences. But one also cannot forget the qualia of culture. It feels a certain way to be an individualist or a collectivist. Psychological research on culture has generally been good about this. Michael Bond (this volume) might say it has been too good-and that it has neglected to study actual behavior. We find ourselves in a contradictory position. We agree wholeheartedly with Bond, but we also believe that psychology can go even further in emphasizing the phenomenological experience of being a member of one culture or another. Studying these qualia is important for two reasons. First, we believe that it is intrinsically important if one wishes to understand and capture the lived experience people have. And second, as argued above, we believe that the qualia of individual phenomenological experience are going to be important in understanding how cultures and ideologies reinforce each other in mutually sustaining cycles. We believe it will be essential to understand the way macro-level ideology and micro-level phenomenology re-create each other. More generally, we believe that the study of culture stands to benefit from an emphasis on the processes of cultural maintenance and change-whether this is through analyses of behavioral patterns, collective representations, models of the self, or other areas. Scholars such as Hong, Morris, Chiu, and Benet-Martmez (2000) and Kitayama and Markus (1999) have moved these issues front and center in their discussions of dynamic constructivism and mutual constitution. Cultures and the individuals in those cultures are constantly re-creating themselves, and our belief is that phenomenological, felt experience at the individual level is going to be an important part of that re-generation process. Notes 1

Note that collectivism and tightness are probably correlated, but that they do not have to be. There can be collectivistic societies with loose social norms (Triandis, 1996, suggests that Thailand is one such culture). Tightness and collectivism seem to go together in East Asia, but that does not mean they always go together (see further discussion in Cohen, 2001). 2 Compare here the findings of Dunning, Meyerowitz, and Holzberg (1989) and Dunning and Cohen (1992) suggesting that the better-than-average effect may be due partly to everyone having their own definitions of excellence that are not necessarily shared by others. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why the "better than average" effect is so hard to find in Japanese culture (see Heine, Lehman, Markus, & Kitayama, 1999).

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Cohen, Hoshino-Browne 3

Whether the outward focus will always lead to better reading of others is another issue. As Raymond Nickerson (1999) points out, assuming that others are like oneself is not a bad heuristic to use in many cases. And further, given the difficulties involved in accurate interpersonal perception, inferences based on imperfect social cues are likely to be often wrong. Accurate interpersonal perception would seem especially difficult when cues are more likely to be either ambiguous, subtly displayed, or misleading. Thus, social cues might be particularly difficult to read in cultures that place an importance on harmony and coordination such that (a) appropriate social behavior requires that one not be so aggressive in asserting one's preferences, feelings, or opinions and (b) a high cultural value placed on face saving prevents many conflicts from an open airing of people's thoughts, emotions, and expectations. (See also experiments on cultural differences in the signaling and detection of anger in Cohen, Vandello, Puente, & Rantilla, 1999; Cohen & Vandello, 2001; as well as Okazaki, 2002; Okazaki, Liu, Longworth, & Minn, 2002). The point here is less about one culture always being more accurate in their interpersonal perceptions. Rather, it is about the way those interpersonal perceptions are constructed—whether they are constructed by projecting what is inside or whether they are more often constructed based on external cues (sometimes accurate, sometimes not) that are out there in the world. Additionally, it is important to note that even when perceptions for both the Asian-Canadian and European-Canadian groups begin with internal cues, the different processes by which interpersonal perceptions are constructed can lead to different sorts of inaccuracies. Study 1 is an example of this: In any given case, relational projection of the generalized other's perspective can lead one astray just as egocentric projection of one's own perspective can. 4 There will often be a great many differences between the two probability samples (e.g., economic, educational, etc.) that one may or may not want to consider cultural, depending on the study, and then one will try to statistically control for as many of these as possible later. 5 All possible pairings of participant sex and ethnicity were used in approximately equal numbers. 6 Importantly, the difference between Euros and Asians in Studies 5 and 6 does not seem to be an artifact of them consciously interpreting and defining the word "empathy" differently. The Davis empathy scale never uses the word "empathy." Instead it has items such as "I try to look at everybody's side of a disagreement before I make a decision," "I really get involved with the feelings of the characters in a novel," or "Other people's misfortunes do not usually disturb me a great deal," etc. 7 For example, Imai and Centner (1997) have discussed Japanese-U.S. differences in characterization with respect to whether objects are described better as either forms or as substances. Hong, Morris, Chiu, and Benet-Martinez (2000)


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as well as Morris and Peng (1994) and Masuda and Nisbett (2001) have investigated characterization with respect to whether scenes are better described in terms of the actions of a central object or the actions of the surrounding field of ferees.

Author Note The research in this chapter was supported in part by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada to the first author and a postgraduate scholarship from the National Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) to the second author. We thank Steve Heine and Mark Zanna for their helpful comments and suggestions on an earlier version of this chapter. Correspondence concerning this chapter should be addressed to Dov Cohen, Department of Psychology, University of Illinois, Champaign, Illinois 61820. E-mail: [email protected] References Baldwin, M. W., & Holmes, J. G. (1987). Salient private audiences and awareness of the self. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52, 1087-1098. Butler, R. W., Damarin, F. L., Beaulieu, C., Schwebel, A. I., & Thorn, B. E. (1989). Assessing cognitive coping strategies for acute postsurgical pain. Psychological Assessment: A Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 1, 41-45. Cohen, D. (2001). Cultural variation: Considerations and implications. Psychological Bulletin, 127, 451-471. Cohen, D. (2003). The American national conversation about (everything but) shame. Social Research, 70, 1075-1108. Cohen, D., & Gunz, A. (2002). As seen by the other...: Perspectives on the self in the memories and emotional perceptions of easterners and westerners. Psychological Science, 13, 55-59. Cohen, D., & Vandello, J. (2001). Honor and "faking" honorability. In Randolph Nesse (Ed.) Evolution and the capacity for commitment (pp. 163-185). New York: Russell Sage. Cohen, D., Vandello, J., Puente, S., & Rantilla, A. (1999). "When you call me that, smile!" How norms for politeness, interaction styles, and aggression work together in Southern culture. Social Psychology Quarterly, 62, 257-275. Cooley, C. H. (1970). Human nature and social order. New York: Schocken Books. (Original work published 1902) Davis, M. H. (1980). A multidimensional approach to individual differences in empathy. Catalog of Selected Documents in Psychology, 10, MS. 2124, pp. 85. Davis, M. H., Soderlund, T., Cole, J., Gadol, E., Kute, M., Myers, M., & Weihing, J. (2003) Cognitions associated with attempts to empathize: How do we imagine the perspective of another? Manuscript submitted for publication.

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Kuehnen, U., & Oyserman, D. (2002). Thinking about the self influences thinking in general. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 38, 492-499. Lillard, A. S., & Flavell, J. H. (1990). Young children's preference for mental state versus behavioral descriptions of human action. Child Development, 61, 731-741. Markus, H., & Kitayama, S. (1991). Culture and the self: Implications for cognition, emotion, and motivation. Psychological Review, 98, 224-253. Masuda, T., & Nisbett, R. (2001). Attending holistically versus analytically: Comparing the context sensitivity of Japanese and Americans. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81, 922-934. Mead, G. (1934). Mind, self, and society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Morling, B., Kitayama, S., & Miyamoto, Y. (2002). Cultural practices emphasize influence in the United States and adjustment in Japan. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. 28, 311-323. Morris, M. W., & Peng, K. (1994). Culture and cause: American and Chinese attributions for social and physical events. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67, 949-971. Morris, W. (Ed.). (1982). The American Heritage dictionary (2nd college ed.). Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Nagel, T. (1974). What is it like to be a bat? The Philosophical Review, 83, 435–450. Newton, E. L. (1990). The rocky road from actions to intentions. Dissertation Abstracts International, 57(8-B), pp. 4105. Nickerson, R. (1999). How we know and sometimes misjudge what others know: Imputing one's knowledge to others. Psychological Bulletin, 125, 737-759. Nigro, G., & Neisser, U. (1983). Point of view in personal memories. Cognitive Psychology, 15, 467-482. Oishi, S., Wyer, R., & Colcombe, S. (2000). Cultural variation in the use of current life satisfaction to predict the future. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74, 434-445. Okazaki, S. (2002). Self-other agreement on affective distress scales in Asian Americans and White Americans. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 49, 428-437. Okazaki, S., Liu, J., Longworth, S., & Minn, J. (2002). Asian American-White American differences in expressions of social anxiety: A replication and extension. Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology, 8, 234-247. Piaget, J., & Inhelder, B. (1956). The child's conception of space. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Ruffman, T., Perner, J., & Parkin, L. (1999). How parenting style affects false belief understanding. Social Development, 8, 395-411. Selman, R. (1977). A structural developmental model of social cognition. Counseling psychologist, 6, 3-6. Smith, A. (1984). The theory of moral sentiment (D. Raphael & A. Maccfie, Eds.). Oxford, England: Clarendon. (Original work published 1759) Smith, T. & Cohen, D. (2003). Characterizing the social world. Unpublished manuscript, University of Illinois. Trafimow, D., Triandis, H., & Goto, S. (1991). Some tests of the distinction between the private and the collective self. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 60, 649-655.

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Chapter 4

Culture and Relationships: The Downside of Self-Contained Individualism Kenneth L. Dion and Karen K. Dion, University of Toronto

Our work has focused on cultural perspectives on heterosexual love, including issues pertaining to love and interdependence and love and views of self. When we first considered these issues in the 1980s (K. L. Dion & K. K. Dion, 1988), little research was being conducted on the cultural context of close relationships by social or cross-cultural psychologists in Canada or the United States, who studied topics such as attraction, love, relationship development, or relationship maintenance. We contended, then as now, that social psychological phenomena such as love and intimate relationships can be more fully understood by considering the societal and cultural context, particularly family structure and societal norms pertaining to close relationships. The statement that "They met, fell wildly in love, married (or cohabited) and hoped to live happily ever after" exemplifies one (indeed, several) cultural scripts, rather than necessarily being a universal description of the nature and sequence of adult pair-bonding. Consider the following statement provided by a young woman describing the development of her relationship with her fiance: "We never talked about the word love when we saw each other; therefore I trust him deeply and respect him very much." The young woman was Chinese; the quote is from Hsu's (1981) analysis of the different connotations of the word love in traditional Chinese society, as contrasted with what he characterized as the North American view of love. Hsu suggested that when thinking of romantic love: "An American asks, "How does my heart feel?" From the perspective of Chinese cultural traditions, an individual would ask: "What will other people say?"" Many, if not all, cultures contain folk tales and stories of passionate love attachments. In some cases, however, these are cautionary tales, not tales of ideal relationships. We have argued in various papers and presentations over the past 15 years (K. K. Dion & K. L. Dion, 1991, 1993, 1996a, 1996b; K. L. Dion & K. K. Dion, 1993) that the sociocultural constructs of individualism and collectivism 77

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have relevance for understanding the psychology of love and different cultural scripts for romantic love. The aforementioned quote from Hsu, in fact, nicely captures how the meaning of a close personal relationship such as heterosexual marriage can be interpreted very differently depending on the relative emphasis on fulfilling personal desires and one's obligations to others. Individualism and collectivism have received considerable attention in the cross-cultural and cultural psychology literature since the 1980s to the present (e.g., Hofstede, 1980, 2001; Hui, 1988; Hui & Triandis, 1986; Oyserman, Coon, & Kemmelmeier, 2002; Triandis, 1995). At core, these constructs concern the relation between the individual and the group and address a key issue: namely, whose interests should be given priority when balancing the interests, needs, and priorities of individuals and the in-groups to which they belong. For example, cross-cultural psychologist Harry Hui (1988) defined individualism as subordinating the goals of collectivities to the individuals' goals, whereas reversing these priorities defined collectivism. Sociologist Norval Glenn (1987) offered a similar definition by stating that "modern individualism" emphasizes the autonomy and freedom of the individual, with its primary tenet being that the individual's foremost obligation is to the self. The constructs of individualism and collectivism have also been applied to societies as well as to individuals by sociologists, as perhaps best illustrated by the seminal work of organizational sociologist Geert Hofstede (1980, 2001). In this area of research, level of analysis—that is, societal or individual—is an important distinction. In our writing on this topic, we use the terms societal individualism and societal collectivism when these concepts are applied at the societal level, whereas we suggest the terms psychological individualism and psychological collectivism for their application at the individual level (e.g., K. K. Dion & K. L. Dion, 1993, 1996a, 1996b). As Hofstede (2001) noted, individualism and collectivism at the societal level are opposite poles of a single bipolar dimension. At the individual level, however, it is theoretically possible for a person to be both individualistic and collectivistic at the same time but usually in different domains, such as individualistic in the economic domain but collectivistic in the family domain. Most individuals tend to be consistently individualistic or collectivistic across domains. In this chapter, we focus on our own and others' research findings concerning individualism and collectivism and several important relationship dimensions. We have conducted research on this issue during the past decade and a half to the present. We begin by noting two key points: (1) individualism has been implicated theoretically as relating to the quality of close relationships by a variety of scholars, ourselves included, and (2) the nature of the relation between individualism and close relationships has been a matter of theoretical debate and divergent views among psychologists and other social scientists. This debate focuses on manifestations of psychological individualism, especially in the United

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States and Canada, during the latter 20th century and the early 21st century. Our own research has been conducted within English Canada, and the findings we present below are drawn mainly from Canada and the United States. In a final section of this chapter, we address some issues pertaining to individualism and collectivism and the psychology of relationships and love in other societies as well.

Does Psychological Individualism Help or Hinder Close Relationships? Let us begin, then, with the first key point noted above: viz., how psychologists and sociologists have construed the relationship between individualism and close relationships at the level of the individual. On one hand, several scholars have proposed that individualism inhibits developing interdependent and/or close relationships with others. Edward Sampson (1977), for one, has frequently criticized a type of individualism he argues is a prevalent cultural ethos in the United States. Sampson suggested that a dominant cultural ideal in the United States is an extreme form of individualism, which he has labelled "self-contained individualism." As the label implies, individuals endorsing this value strive to be complete in themselves, independent of other persons or groups--in a sense, "islands unto themselves"-with the end result being alienation and isolation from others in a pursuit of an illusory and unattainable goal. Similarly, sociologist Robert Bellah and his colleagues, writing about the role of individualism in private and public domains of life in the United States suggested in their book Habits of the Heart that individualism often presents severe stresses in the private domain of close personal relationships (Bellah, Madsen, Sullivan, Swidler, & Tipton, 1985). It is obviously hard to reconcile the competing demands of preserving individual autonomy, while also meeting the needs and expectations of a partner in a close, intimate relationship. More recently, psychologist David Myers (2000) likewise implicated adherence to the values of radical individualism to the decline of marriage and the high divorce rate in the United States. However, individualism has certainly not been without its defenders. Most notably, psychologist Alan Waterman (1981, 1984) has argued that critics of individualism have based their analyses on outmoded and undocumented assumptions about this construct. Drawing on personality and developmental psychology theorists such as Maslow, Erikson, and Kohlberg, Waterman described the core feature of individualism as being true to oneself and fulfilling one's potential, freedom of choice, personal responsibility, and respect for others' integrity. He suggested that individualism fosters rather than constrains interdependence. Close relationships obviously provide an important domain for testing the hypothesized link between psychological individualism and interdependence. Waterman supported his claim by citing several studies

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suggesting positive associations between self-actualization and love, and between identity status and having resolved an identity crisis and developing an intimate and committed relationship, respectively. By contrast, our own program of research on personality correlates of romantic love in the 1970s and 1980s (for a review, see K. K. Dion & K. L. Dion, 1985) included many of the same personality dimensions that Waterman himself cited as reflecting psychological individualism, such as self-esteem, selfactualization, and internal control. Yet our findings were more consistent with Sampson's portrayal of the self-contained individualist than Waterman's more sanguine analysis and positive portrayal of the individualist in love. However, neither Waterman's review of the literature on psychological individualism, nor our own previous research on the personality correlates of romantic love had actually tested these competing hypotheses directly by measuring respondents' endorsement of psychological individualism and collectivism, respectively, and relating these individual differences in values to key dimensions of relationships.

Correlates of Psychological Individualism in Canada and the United States Accordingly, we conducted two studies in the late 1980s and early 1990s to test these competing views concerning the link between psychological individualism and experiences in close relationships. In both studies, respondents were Canadian university students in Toronto. The measure of psychological individualism and collectivism we relied upon consisted of items originally developed by sociologists Paul Breer and Edwin Locke (1965) in a research program exploring the effects of task experience on attitudes. These investigators developed items pertaining to specific domains of psychological individualism and collectivism (e.g., neighborhood, family, school) as well as non-domain specific, general items of these two values. Other researchers have since followed our lead by also using the Breer and Locke items in their research on the relationship correlates of psychological individualism and collectivism (e.g., Agnew & Lee, 1997; Kemmelmeier, Sanchez-Burks, Cytron, & Coon, 1998, as cited in Oyserman et al., 2002). In our first study (K. K. Dion & K. L. Dion, 1991), participants completed the Breer and Locke items, as well as several measures of perceived relationship qualities. The Breer and Locke items were factor analyzed, yielding factor-based indices of different components of psychological individualism and collectivism. Of the four factors, two were conceptually relevant to the hypotheses concerning the link between individualism and love, one reflecting psychological collectivism (a Belongingness index) and the other, psychological individualism (a Self-Contained Individualism index). Items comprising these indices are shown in Table 4.1. The other two indices were domain-specific, namely psychological


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Table 4.1 Selected Indexes of Psychological Individualism and Collectivism in our 1991 Study

Self-Contained Individualism Items: The best way to avoid trouble is to be as completely self-sufficient as possible. In life, an individual should for the most part "go it alone," assuring oneself of privacy, having much time to oneself, attempting to control one's life. My freedom and autonomy mean more to me than almost anything else. To me, one of the most attractive features of family life is the very deep sense of belonging it provides, (reversed) Belongingness Items: It is very important to me to know that there is a group, clique, neighborhood, or community to which I can belong. For me, life would be pretty empty without some kind of group to identify with, belong to, feel a part of.

collectivism in the school/work context and psychological individualism concerning relations with neighbors, and therefore, are irrelevant to this discussion. The belongingness and self-contained individualism indices were employed as predictors in regression analyses, along with age and sex of respondent. The criterion measures included both attitudes toward relationships and attitudes toward one's partner, as well as reported relationship quality. The findings in our 1991 study favored the critique of psychological individualism, at least its self-contained variant, as being corrosive in close personal relationships. First, greater endorsement of self-contained individualism related positively to stronger beliefs in a more permissive, manipulative view of love called "ludic" love, in which love is viewed as a game that one plays to win. Self-contained individualism was also associated with a lower likelihood of respondents in our sample of university students reporting ever having been in love. Those endorsing self-contained individualism were also less likely to characterize their personal experience of love as being tender, deep, and rewarding. We had also included Rubin's (1970) measure of love and involvement with one's partner in the 1991 study and analyzed the subscales of care, need, and trust previously identified by Steck, Levitan, McLane, and Kelley (1982), to which we also added a subscale of physical attraction. The three relationship dimensions on the Rubin love scale—care, need, trust—as well as the physical attraction scale related negatively to scores on self-contained individualism. As noted above, the

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overall pattern of findings is clearly consistent with the hypothesis that psychological individualism—defined here as valuing personal autonomy and self-reliance—was related to less reported interdependence and less reported caring in intimate heterosexual relationships among a sample of young adults in an English-Canadian university. Consistent with these findings, studies conducted subsequently by other researchers likewise supported the hypothesis of a negative relationship between psychological individualism and relationship commitment (Agnew & Lee, 1997; Kemmelmeier et al., 1998, Study 2). These studies involved university samples from the United States (Agnew & Lee, N = 152; Kemmelmeier et al., 1998; Study 1 sample, N = 160; sample 2, N = 356, as cited in Oyserman et al., 2002). These investigators similarly measured the psychological individualism construct using Table 4. 2 Selected Indexes of Psychological Individualism and Collectivism in our 1993 Study

Self-Contained Individualism Items My freedom and autonomy mean more to me than almost anything else. When faced with a difficult personal problem, it is better to decide what to do yourself rather than follow the advice of others. What happens to me is my own doing. In life, an individual should for the most part "go it alone," assuring oneself of privacy, having much time to oneself, attempting to control one's own life. The independent, autonomous individual is society's major source of new ideas. The best way to avoid trouble is to be as completely self-sufficient as possible. One should live one's life independently of others as much as possible. An individual's first obligation is to oneself, and only secondarily to other members of her or his family. If a group is slowing me down, it is better to leave it and work alone.

Belongingness Items For me, life would be pretty empty without some kind of group to identify with, belong to, feel a part of. It is very important to me to know there is a group, clique, neighborhood, or community to which I can "belong." The group spirit - working together, sharing each other's goals, cooperating as a team - this is something worth striving for. In any definition of the good life, companionship, friendship, and fellowship should all receive high priority.


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scales derived from the Breer and Locke scales, while relationship commitment was assessed with a measure developed and used extensively by Rusbult and her colleagues in connection with research on the interdependence model (Rusbult, Martz, & Agnew, 1998)-a leading theory of commitment and satisfaction in close, personal relationships. Basically, these studies add to, and complement, our own studies noted above and below, in showing that psychological individualism relates negatively to reported commitment in an intimate relationship. In a second study of relationship correlates (K. L. Dion & K. K. Dion, 1993; K. K. Dion & K. L. Dion, 1996b), we included measures to examine the relation between attitudes toward marriage and toward divorce, on the one hand, and psychological individualism and collectivism, on the other hand. In our 1993 study, participants were once again Canadian university students in Toronto (N = 160) who completed the Breer and Locke measures of individualism and collectivism in addition to the marriage and divorce measures. The Breer and Locke items were once again multidimensional, with principal components analysis yielding four dimensions similar to those that emerged in our 1991 study. One of these was a dimension of "self-contained" individualism but with more items and thus better definition of the construct, as shown in Table 4.2. A psychological collectivism dimension also emerged, stressing the importance of group belongingness and commitment to one's primary groups. The other two components were again domain specific, a psychological individualism component concerning relations with neighbors and a psychological collectivism component concerning collective views of work and team projects, which are not discussed further. We focused on attitudes toward marriage and divorce in our 1993 study because we hypothesized that self-contained individualism as well as belongingness would relate to these critical relationship attitudes. We expected, for example, that endorsing self-contained individualism would relate to more negative views of marriage. Table 4.3 shows sample items from each of these measures. Once again, as in our 1991 study, regression analyses were performed with four predictors: viz., indices of self-contained individualism and belongingness plus sex and age of respondent. Self-contained individualism in our 1993 study was once again related to university students being less likely to report ever having been in love as well as a tendency to endorse a more permissive, noncommittal view of love. In addition, self-contained individualism related positively to a more pragmatic style of love. In addition, the greater the endorsement of self-contained individualism, the more negative the respondent's view of marriage and the greater their preference for delaying marriage by desiring to marry at a later age. By contrast, psychological collectivism (i.e., belongingness) related positively to the caring subscale of the Rubin love measure, as well as to reporting more pragmatic, more friendship-

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Dion and Dion Table 4.3 Sample Items from the Attitudes Toward Marriage and Divorce Scales in our 1993 Study

Attitudes Toward Marriage Index If you many, to what extent will you miss the life you had as a single person? In your opinion, will adjustment to married life be difficult for you? How happy do you think you will be if you marry? Do you ever have doubts about your chance of having a successful marriage?

Attitudes Toward Divorce Index I feel that divorce is a sensible solution to many unhappy marriages If a couple finds getting along with each other a real struggle, then they should not feel obligated to remain married. Children are better off living with one parent rather than with two who cannot get along well together. Divorce is no real solution to an unhappy marriage, (reverse scored) Divorce is one of our greatest social evils. (reverse scored) Children need a home with both a father and a mother even though the parents are not especially suited to one another. (reverse scored)

-oriented, and more altruistic styles of love. Moreover, psychological collectivists who valued belongingness showed a tendency toward a more negative view of divorce.

Correlates of Psychological Individualism in the U.S. General Social Survey In the studies discussed thus far, the relationship correlates of psychological individualism were investigated with convenience samples of Canadian and U. S. university undergraduates as research participants. One can obviously ask and question whether similar findings would be obtained with a broader representative sampling of people who are primarily non-students in the United States or Canada. The General Social Survey (hereafter GSS) (Davis & Smith, 1992) is an almost annual, high-quality probability survey of English-speaking adults in U. S. households who are interviewed face-to-face, mostly in their homes. The GSS provides us an opportunity to check the external validity of the preceding findings from the psychological laboratory with survey data linking psychological individualism and close relationships, including both romantic and family


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relationships as well as friendships and reported sexual behavior, and items reflecting subjective well-being. In 1993, the GSS included five questions to assess individualism as part of a special module of questions used that year. These questions dealt with diverse domains of individualism and, perhaps for that reason, the items do not correlate or cohere well with one another. So, one cannot create a viable index of individualism from the five survey questions or even a smaller subset. Nevertheless, one question captures fairly well a self-focused, "me first" form of psychological individualism, not unlike the self-contained individualism we and others have emphasized as potentially problematic for personal relationships. The GSS mnemonic for this variable is "selfirst." The full statement presented to respondents was: "You have to take care of yourself first, and if you have any energy left over, then help other people." Approximately 1,600 U.S. GSS survey participants responded to this item with a standard Likert response format allowing respondents to specify degrees of agreement or disagreement. We took this "self-first" individualism item and included it along with sex and age of respondent as predictors in simultaneous regression analyses using as separate criteria other GSS items from several domains, including reported happiness, personal satisfaction, the perceived importance of family, romantic, and marital relationships, as well as sexual attitudes and reported sexual behavior. Let us begin with the domain of happiness and subjective well-being. The higher the respondents' self-first individualism, the less their general happiness, the lower their happiness in their romantic relationships, the lower the reported happiness in their marriage, and the weaker the sense that life is exciting. As for the relative importance of different aspects of life, higher self-first individualism was associated with a stronger belief in the importance of being self-sufficient, a stronger belief that personal freedom is more important than marriage, as well as a lower belief in the importance of being married and of having children, respectively. In regard to different realms of satisfaction, the greater the self-first individualism among U.S. GSS respondents in the 1993 General Social Survey, the less the satisfaction with family life, with friends, and with the city or place respondents lived in. In regard to family life and divorce, a stronger belief in self-first individualism was associated with a decreased sense of being successful in family life and with a greater likelihood of having been divorced both in the prior year and in the past five years. In the domain of sexual attitudes and reported sexual behavior, stronger advocacy of self-first individualism among U.S. GSS respondents was associated with beliefs that having sex with someone other than your spouse is not wrong, that sex before marriage is not wrong, and that teenage sex, at ages 14-16, is not wrong. Regression analyses also revealed that highly individualistic respondents were also more likely than their less individualistic counterparts to have seen an

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X-rated movie in the last year, to have had sex with persons other than their spouse or regular partner, to have had sex for pay or been paid for it in the last year, to not having used a condom the last time they had sex, and to not have been in a relationship with their last sex partner. Despite the limitations of a one-item measure of self-contained individualism, these regression analyses still reveal a remarkably clear, consistent, and disturbing portrait of the self-contained or self-focused individualist in her or his close personal relationships. To summarize, GSS respondents scoring high on this form of psychological individualism reported lower subjective well-being and happiness in their personal and family relationships, lower levels of satisfaction with several dimensions of their lives including friends and family, and more instances of profligate sexual behavior outside of committed relationships than those scoring low on this dimension. These findings from the survey data add to the portrait from correlational studies in the psychological laboratory by ourselves and others indicating that the self-contained individualist reports lower commitment, less caring, and a more ludic or game-playing style in relationships.

Broadening the Nomological Network Our understanding of the construct of self-contained individualism may also be deepened by considering its possible links to other constructs in the personality and relationships literatures, which show a similar profile of empirical findings. For example, we have previously speculated that self-contained individualism overlaps with the construct of the avoidant attachment style (K. K. Dion & K. L. Dion, 1985, 1993; K. L. Dion & K. K. Dion, 1993), especially the dismissing style. In Bartholomew and Horowitz's (1991) fourfold model of attachment styles, the dismissing style reflects a positive mental model of the self together with a negative mental model of others. According to Bartholomew and Horowitz (1991) and empirically documented by Griffin and Bartholomew (1994), those with a dismissing attachment style avoid close relationships, while trying to maintain their independence and a sense of invulnerability. The construct of self-contained individualism is also very likely to be closely tied to individual differences in the personality dimension of narcissism. Those scoring high on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI), for example, have a grandiose view of themselves as different but better than others; and they are less apt than their low-scoring counterparts to be concerned with relationship intimacy (Campbell, Foster, & Finkel, 2002). In particular, Campbell and his colleagues consistently found positive relationships between narcissism as measured by the NPI and a game-playing love style in past and present dating relationships across five studies with college student samples from several U.S. states. These investigators also showed that the link between narcissism and a game-playing style was mediated by needs for power and autonomy and that


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narcissism was also associated with lower commitment to relationships. These latter findings, of course, parallel closely the aforementioned findings from several studies by us and others that self-contained individualism is linked to a game-playing style and to lower relationship commitment, respectively. In sum, there are intriguing and strongly suggestive parallels among the constructs of self-contained individualism, the dismissing attachment style, and the narcissistic personality in terms of their pattern of known relationships correlates. We shall seek to document these links in our ongoing program of research into the correlates of self-contained individualism. Taken together, these constructs define a conceptual prototype of a person with a grandiose, inflated self-concept, who is strongly oriented toward personal autonomy and power in relationships and adopts a deliberate strategy of a game playing style with as little commitment as possible to relationship partners.

Individualism and Divorce at the Societal Level The preceding studies and analyses deal with individualism and collectivism as value correlates to relationship dimensions at the psychological level of the individual. We can also ask whether a similar relationship obtains at the societal or national level. It is entirely possible, of course, to have a different pattern of findings between individualism and close relationship indices (e.g., marriage and divorce rates) at the two different levels of analysis. For the goal of exploring the correlates of societal individualism, one can use Hofstede's (1980, 2001) country indicators of individualism and other value dimensions. Hofstede's index of individualism is based on work values and is defined by a strong desire for autonomy and personal freedom in a multinational organization, in his case IBM. Several scholars (Cherlin, 1981; Glenn & Weaver, 1988; Lester, 1995; Stack, 1994) have speculated that individualism correlates positively with divorce at both individual and societal levels. Does societal individualism correlate with divorce rates in countries included in the Hofstede dataset of countries? Lester (1995) used Hofstede's (1980) individualism ratings for 39 countries, for which 1980 divorce rates were available for 26 of these. Lester reported a positive Pearson product-moment correlation of .76 between individualism and divorce rate. This positive relationship was reduced but remained a still substantial .40 after controlling for gross domestic product per capita. In the recent, second edition of Culture's Consequences, Hofstede (2001) increased his dataset of index scores for individualism and several other values to 50 different countries and three regions. Using this larger dataset and more current divorce statistics, we re-checked the relationship between individualism at the country level and divorce rates for the latter 1990s. This analysis assesses the predictive validity of societal individualism, since the indexes were for the most part created from measures obtained several decades before the 1990s. For

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1995, we have societal individualism and divorce rate measures for 39 of 50 countries, and a strong, positive correlation, r(37) = .773, p < .001, closely similar to Lester's. This relationship remains virtually intact after controlling for country GDP per capita, partial r = .84, p < .001, and also remains unchanged after controlling for both country GDP and the power distance index, partial r(14) = .77, p < .001. [Power distance refers to "... the extent to which the less powerful members...within a country expect and accept that power is distributed unequally" (emphasis in original) (Hofstede, 1997, p. 28).] Similar results are obtained when divorce rates for 1996, 1997, and 1998 are employed, despite a drop in the sample size to 22 countries. Of the four value dimensions extracted by Hofstede (1980, 1997, 2001) for countries, only societal individualism correlated as highly with national divorce rates in the latter 1990s. Neither power distance, uncertainty avoidance ("...the extent to which a society's members feel threatened by uncertain or unknown situations" (emphasis in original) (Hofstede, 1997, p. 113), masculinity-femininity (assertiveness vs. modesty), nor long- vs. short-term time orientation-related as highly to divorce rates for this set of countries. The closest is power distance, a strong correlate of individualism, with Pearson product-moment correlations in the .60 range with country divorce rates for the latter 1990s. However, when country GDP per capita and societal individualism are partialled out, the relationship between power distance and divorce rates effectively disappears. Uncertainty avoidance and length of time orientation correlated positively with late 1990s divorce rates in the .3-.4 range; and the masculinity-femininity index for countries had no relationship whatever to divorce rates. [The positive relationship between uncertainty avoidance and divorce at the societal level probably reflects the greater sense of anomie and heightened anxiety in countries scoring high in uncertainty avoidance in the latter 20th century. Consistent with this notion, Hofstede (1997, pp. 114-115) noted that countries scoring high in symptoms or outcomes of anxiety and anomie, as reflected by high rates of suicide, alcoholism, accident death rate, and proportion of their population in prison, are also ones scoring high in uncertainty avoidance, resulting in a strong positive correlation.] In sum, as a societal value dimension, individualism relates more strongly to divorce than the other Hofstede indexes for countries and is a uniquely effectively correlate and predictor at the societal level.

Correlates of Individualism Outside the United States and Canada The preceding findings have suggested the following paradox to us. Although being "in love" as a basis for marriage is endorsed by young adults as an important precondition for marriage in contemporary societies characterized as individualistic, such as Canada and the United States, certain types of individualism at the psychological level make the likelihood of developing


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intimacy and mutual commitment more difficult (K. K. Dion & K. L. Dion, 1993). This difficulty is documented not only by the reported relationship correlates but also by different social indicators of relationship outcomes. Is this pattern likely to repeat itself in other cultural contexts beyond the United States and Canada? Cross-cultural research suggests a link between societal individualism and the importance of love as a basis for marriage. Indirect evidence for this proposition comes from Lee and Stone's (1980) research. They explored the relationship between family structure and the importance of love-based marriage and autonomous choice of one's marital partner in 117 non-industrialized societies. They found that marriage based on love and choice of one's spouse was more likely to occur in societies in which family structure is characterized as nuclear, compared to those with extended family systems. In the early 1990s, Levine, Sato, Hashimoto, and Verma (1995) asked university undergraduates in a diverse sampling of 11 different cultures several survey questions about the importance of love in a marital relationship. The students were from what these researchers described as "secondary population centers" on the assumption that students from these areas would endorse more traditional cultural values compared to students from larger cities. They asked respondents to reply to three questions originally posed to U.S. university students by Kephart (1967). One of these concerned the stated willingness to many a person who had many admirable qualities... but with whom one was not "in love." Comparing responses to this question across the 11 societies, Levine and his colleagues found a positive correlation between the affirmation of love-based marriage and Hofstede's societal individualism scores. In the samples from individualistic countries, as shown in Table 4.4, the percentage of "no" responses exceeded considerably that for "yes" and "undecided" responses, indicating a preference for love-based marriage. Table 4.4 "If a man (woman) had all the other qualities you desired, would you marry this person if you were not in love with him (her)" (Adapted from Levine et al., 1995)

Individualistic Countries USA England Australia Mexico Brazil

Undecided 10.6 9.1 15.2 9.3 10.0

No 85.9 83.6 80.0 80.5 85.7

Yes 3.5 7.3 4.8 10.2 4.3

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Table 4.5 "If a man (woman) had all the other qualities you desired, would you marry this person if you were not in love with him (her)" (Adapted from Levine et al., 1995)

Collectivistic Countries India Pakistan Thailand

Japan Hang Kong

Undecided 26.9 10.4 47.5 35.7 16.7

No 24.0 39 .1 33.8 62.0 77.6

Yes 49.0 50.4 18.8 2.3 5.8

It is particularly interesting, however, to examine closely the range of responses among students from societies previously labelled "collectivistic." As shown in Table 4.5, for those societies, there was increasing diversity of opinion. Looking first at those from Japan and from Hong Kong, very few clearly said "yes," the majority said "no," while a sizable group, especially in Japan, were "undecided." The pattern for students from three other societies was somewhat different. The samples from India, Pakistan, and to a lesser extent, Thailand, were more likely to endorse marrying without being "in love," with nearly half in the first two groups stating a willingness to marry without love, assuming their partner had all of the other qualities they desired. The choices of the first two samples in India and Pakistan in pan reflect the tradition of arranged marriages in these societies. These findings illustrate two important points relevant to studying culture and relationships: diversity across and within societies labelled as "collectivistic." A final set of findings from survey data reported in Sumiko Iwao's (1993) book about cultural continuity and change among Japanese women illustrates the second point of "within country" diversity quite clearly. She described survey data collected in 1990 comparing unmarried and married adults age 18 and older in Japan and the United States by Roper and Dentsu (as cited in Iwao, 1993, pp. 69-73). As she notes, the items were originally designed for U.S. samples and reflect the expectations of U.S. respondents about what is important in a marriage. Of the 13 items, U.S. respondents had greater expectations of marriage compared to Japanese respondents, except for two items (having children and financial security), which Japanese women were more likely to rate as very important. Being in love and keeping romance alive were endorsed as very important by U. S., as compared to Japanese, respondents. Of greater interest, however, are the cohort comparisons of Japanese women shown in Table 4.6. The percentage endorsement suggests a trend towards valuing of being "in love" with one's spouse and psychological intimacy in the

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4. Culture and Relationships Table 4.6 Percentage of Japanese Women of Different Age Groups Reporting Item to be "Very Important" (Adapted from Iwao, 1993)

Item Being in Love Keeping Romance Alive Having Children Able to Talk Together Spouse Understanding What You Do Every Day

30-39

40-49

43% 45% 83%

75% 35% 50% 81%

67% 26% 50% 69%

50+ 58% 20% 57% 65%

73%

66%

58%

49%

20-29 80%

marital relationship among Japanese women in the youngest cohort. Social scientists from several Asian societies have noted that in surveys of university students' values, among recent cohorts, there has been greater endorsement of values reflecting a desire for personal expression and personal gratification (Cha, 1994; Yang, 1996). The greater endorsement of love-based marriage is consistent with these emerging trends. Does this mean that future social indicators from these societies will ultimately indicate a greater incidence of relationship breakdown (divorce) compared to earlier cohorts? Will there be evidence of less relationship commitment and more negative attitudes toward commitment that we and others have found in research on the relationship correlates of psychological individualism? The answer in part will depend on the type of psychological individualism that emerges. As we have noted elsewhere (K. K. Dion & K. L. Dion, 1993, 1996a, 1996b), other aspects or types of individualism might yield a different pattern. Yang (1996) (and others) have noted that the greater emphasis on personal fulfilment can co-exist with some traditional collectivistic values. It is therefore important to examine how recent cohorts of young adults balance a desire for personal fulfilment with an awareness of obligations to others. In conclusion, self-contained individualism, with its extreme emphasis on self-sufficiency and autonomy from others, does seem problematic for intimate relationships at the level of individuals in Canada and the United States and at the level of societies or nations. As the English poet and clergyman John Donne emphasized many years ago, it may indeed be detrimental, if not impossible, for men and women to be "islands unto themselves" in their personal and social relationships. Of course, other forms of individualism at the psychological and societal levels, such as the normative or ethical individualism Waterman and others have stressed, could well exist and relate positively to close relationships. That is a project for advocates of individualism to pursue and to document empirically.

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A paradox also emerges from the fact that individualistic societies emphasize love as the basis for marriage, despite the fact that at least some forms of individualism, such as self-contained individualism, make the task of attaining and maintaining an intimate, lasting relationship apparently more difficult. Of course, since we have relied entirely on correlational evidence in this chapter, the relationships between individualism and personal relationships documented above are liable to the criticism that they are potentially due to a third variable to which both dimensions are related at the level of individuals and/or societies. Still, the contention that self-contained individualism is potentially toxic or at least troublesome for relationships at both the individual (or psychological) and the cultural (or societal) levels nevertheless remains persuasive, given the weight and consistency of accumulating evidence behind it.

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Rubin, Z. (1970). Measurement of romantic love. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 16, 265-273. Rusbult, C. E., Martz, J. M, & Agnew, C. R. (1998). The investment model scale: Measuring commitment level, satisfaction level, quality of alternatives, and investment size. Personal Relationships, 5, 357-391. Sampson, E. E. (1977). Psychology and the American ideal. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 35, 767-782. Stack, S. (1994). Divorce. In Encyclopedia of human behavior (Vol. 2, pp. 153-163). San Diego, CA: Academic. Steck, L., Levitan, D., McLane, D., & Kelley, H. H. (1982). Care, need, and conceptions of love. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 43, 481-491. Triandis, H C. (1995). Individualism and collectivism. Boulder, CO: Westview. Waterman, A. S. (1981). Individualism and interdependence. American Psychologist, 36, 762-773. Waterman, A. S. (1984). The psychology of individualism. New York: Praeger. United Nations. (2001). Statistical yearbook, forty-fifth issue-1998. New York: United Nations. Yang, K-S. (1996). Psychological transformation of the Chinese people as a result of societal modernization. In M. Bond (Ed.), Handbook of Chinese psychology (pp. 479-498). Hong Kong: Oxford University Press.

Chapter 5

Constructing Good Selves in Japan and North America Steven J. Heine, University of British Columbia

Everyone has a self. That is, they have an integrated collection of beliefs about themselves, extending across time, that shapes their interpretations and reactions to particular situations and relationships with others. Likewise, I propose that everyone is motivated to have a good self. By a "good" self I mean a way of perceiving oneself, and acting in ways consistent with these perceptions, that is associated with favorable consequences for the individual. The consequences that befall upon an individual for any given way of thinking are not necessarily universal across time and place; rather they are contingent upon the environment that affords them. Different cultural environments will render different ways of thinking as beneficial or costly, and as such, there are potentially different ways of becoming a good self. In this chapter, I explore how the maintenance of positive self-views is associated with the construction of good selves in two cultural environments: Japan and North America. Positive self-views do not exist in isolation; rather, they are tethered to a number of psychological processes that sustain them. Hence, understanding how people strive to maintain positive self-views in different cultures will be fostered by exploring the cultural variability in specific psychological processes that relate to these views.

Self-Esteem and Face There are at least two ways that we can conceive of people maintaining positive views about themselves. One way is that people can maintain their self-esteem; that is, they can strive to evaluate their self and its component features positively. This conceptualization of positive self-views is, of course, highly familiar to psychologists. According to Psycinfo, over the past 35 years there have been, on

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average, almost two publications per day on the topic of self-esteem. It is perhaps the most researched aspect of the self-concept. An alternative route to positive self-views can be achieved by maintaining "face." Face has been defined as "the respectability and/or deference which a person can claim for himself from others by virtue of the relative position he occupies in his social network and the degree to which he is judged to have functioned adequately in that position" (Ho, 1976, p. 883). In contrast to self-esteem, face is not an especially familiar construct among Western psychologists, and there are a few key points from Ho's definition that I would like to highlight. First, face is claimed from others. Individuals are not in the position to determine how much face they can have, rather, they must earn it from others. Second, the amount of face that an individual has is derived from their relative position within a network. The role that an individual occupies determines the amount of face that is available, not the individua''s qualities (although their qualities might influence the roles that they are able to achieve). Third, face is assessed to the degree that an individual has functioned adequately within their position. It is lost when individuals function inadequately, although it is not necessarily increased when they function more than adequately. I will return to discuss these features of face later. The guiding thesis of this chapter is that Japanese and North Americans differ in the importance that they weigh positive self-evaluations as derived through face or self-esteem, and, as such, differ in their efforts to maintain them. I provide evidence to support this argument, and I investigate the question of what psychological processes are implicated by a concern with self-esteem and a concern with face.

Self-Enhancing Versus Self-Improving Motivations In exploring the processes implicated with self-esteem and face maintenance, a good place to start would be to consider the motivations that are most closely associated with them, namely, self-enhancement and self-improvement, respectively. These also represent the relevant processes in which the greatest amount of cross-cultural research has been conducted (for reviews see Heine, Lehman, Markus, & Kitayama, 1999; Ting-Toomey, 1994). First, it is important to be clear what the terms self-enhancement and self-improvement mean, as the terms are broad and vague enough to shelter many potential meanings. By self-enhancement I mean a tendency to overly dwell on, elaborate, and exaggerate positive aspects of the self relative to one's weaknesses. There are other ways that one could define self-enhancement, however, this definition captures the motivational pattern that I am exploring here and is consistent with all the research discussed below. Likewise, by self-improvement I mean a tendency to overly dwell on, elaborate, and exaggerate negative aspects

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of the self relative to one's strengths, in an effort to correct the identified shortcomings. This definition is consistent with motivations studied in much research conducted with East Asian populations, although it is a rather novel motivation within the context of North American psychological research. Note, that operationalized in these ways self-enhancement and self-improvement are not just distinct motivations, but are diametrically opposed in terms of their orientation toward positive information about the self. Self-enhancement emphasizes what is good about the individual whereas self-improvement emphasizes what is not yet good enough. Despite these differences in emphasis, however, both motivations are instrumental in efforts to become a good self. The ways in which self-enhancement can facilitate self-esteem maintenance is quite straightforward. By emphasizing the positive features of the self, and downplaying the negative, self-enhancement can provide the individual with the favorable information necessary to build a solid foundation for self-esteem (Taylor & Brown, 1988). Indeed, it is hard to imagine how individuals could maintain self-esteem if they were not focusing on what is positive about themselves. In contrast, self-improving motivations serve an important function for maintaining face. As face is achieved when others view individuals as meeting standards associated with their roles it becomes important for individuals to identify where they might stand to fall short of others' expectations. By identifying those areas where others' approval is in jeopardy, individuals are able to work toward correcting these potential shortcomings, and thereby insuring their face. In this way, self-improving motivations serve the purpose of directing individuals' efforts toward the areas where their face is most vulnerable (Heine et al., 2001b). Evidence for cultural differences in self-enhancing and self-improving motivations comes from a variety of sources. First, studies contrasting self-esteem across cultures reveal that East Asians tend to score far lower than North Americans, and these differences emerge with a variety of different measures (Bond & Cheung, 1983; Heine & Lehman, 2003; Mahler, 1976). That the cultural differences are observed across so many different measures of self-esteem suggest that the findings are not peculiar to any particular way of measuring self-esteem. North Americans are more likely than East Asians to endorse, or spontaneously offer, statements about their possession of desirable qualities. A wide variety of other methodologies have been used to investigate the extent of cultural differences in these motivations. For example, much research reveals that North Americans have greater recall for their past successes than failures (e.g., Crary, 1966), however, East Asians recall these events equally well (Endo & Meijer, in press). Compared with North Americans, East Asians tend to be less satisfied with themselves in that they have larger actual-ideal and actual-ought self-discrepancies than do North Americans (Meijer, Heine, &

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Yamagami, 1999), and they score lower on measures of subjective well-being (Diener, Diener, & Diener, 1995). East Asians are less likely to make the self-serving attributional bias (i.e., to take credit for their successes and blame others for their failures; for a review see Kitayama, Takagi, & Matsumoto, 1995), and they are also less likely to show evidence for other kinds of self-serving biases (e.g., Heine & Lehman, 1995; Heine & Renshaw, 2002; Markus & Kitayama, 1991; Yik, Bond, & Paulhus, 1998). East Asians are more likely to view situations as causing a decrease in their self-esteem, whereas North Americans are more likely to see situations as opportunities for their self-esteem to increase (e.g., Kitayama, Markus, Matsumoto, & Norasakunnkit, 1997). Moreover, it does not appear to be the case that the cultural differences are limited to the current view of the self, but also to assessment of the future self. East Asians are less optimistic compared with North Americans (e.g., Heine & Lehman, 1995; Lee & Seligman, 1997). An additional way that cultural differences in self-enhancing and self-improving motivations can be observed comes from research that investigates how individuals from different cultures react when they encounter negative information about themselves. A variety of studies have been conducted to determine whether culture shapes how people respond to failure. For example, much research has found that North Americans sometimes deal with an encountered failure by bolstering their self-assessments in an attempt to compensate for the acknowledged weakness (e.g., Baumeister & Jones, 1978). The impact of the failure is minimized in that the individual focuses on unrelated strengths that they hadn't considered before. In contrast to this self-protective tendency, Japanese have been found to show a reverse compensatory self-enhancement bias (Heine, Kitayama, & Lehman, 200la). That is, Japanese who encounter a failure in one domain rate themselves more negatively in other domains as well. Similarly, much research on post-decisional dissonance with North Americans reveals that North Americans typically rationalize their decisions in an apparent attempt to convince themselves that they behaved responsibly (e.g., Steele, Spencer, & Lynch, 1993). Japanese, in contrast, do not show this rationalization in a standard post-decisional dissonance paradigm (Heine & Lehman, 1997b), suggesting that it is not as crucial for Japanese to view their decisions as correct (however, recent research has revealed different strategies by which Japanese rationalize their decisions; Hoshino-Browne, Zanna, Spencer, & Zanna, in press; Kitayama, this volume). Furthermore, while much research reveals that North Americans may deal with a failure by discounting the accuracy of the feedback (Heine, Takata, & Lehman, 2000), devaluing the importance of the task (Heine et al., 2001b; Simon, Greenberg, & Brehm, 1995), or by avoiding the task altogether (Feather, 1966), East Asians view failure feedback to be especially diagnostic and important (Heine et al., 2000, 2001b). East Asians are thus not just


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more likely to make more critical self-evaluations than North Americans; they actively respond to information indicating their weaknesses differently as well. The cultural diversity in self-enhancing and self-improving motivations thus appear across a broad range of methodologies. The magnitude of this diversity is not trivial. According to Cohen (1988) effect sizes greater than .7 are considered to be large. A meta-analysis of 81 published cross-cultural studies of self-enhancing tendencies between East Asians and Westerners revealed that the average effect size (d) of the cultural difference of self-enhancement between North Americans and East Asians was .83. The cultural differences emerge consistently as well; 79 of the 81 revealed significant differences in the expected direction (Heine & Hamamura, 2004). These differences also seem to be protected from several alternative explanations (see Heine, 2003b, for a discussion on this point). In sum, cultures in which self-esteem maintenance is emphasized show more evidence of self-enhancement than those in which greater importance is ascribed to face maintenance. Promotion Versus Prevention Focus Another psychological process that would appear to be implicated by differential emphases of self-esteem and face is regulatory focus. There are two different ways in which individuals can strive to regulate their goal pursuit. The first is a promotion focus, which elaborates upon achieving a positive outcome. When individuals are maintaining this outlook they are concerned with their advancement, accomplishments, and aspirations. In contrast, a prevention outlook focuses on not achieving negative outcomes, and elaborates upon safety, responsibilities, and obligations (Higgins, 1996). As successful functioning in any environment would seem to hinge both on attaining rewards and avoiding costs, these two orientations should be of universal significance, and are clearly evident across species (e.g., Jones, Larkins, & Hughes, 1996). That motivations to attain rewards and avoid costs must be universal, however, does not mean that individuals will engage in these two orientations to an equal extent. A prevention focus should become more evident when an individual is confronted with a looming threat, whereas a promotion focus should be enhanced when individuals have the opportunity to achieve a significant gain. Likewise, managing resources that can be easily lost should lead an individual to adopt a prevention focus, whereas considerations of resources that can be more easily accumulated should lead to a promotion focus. Self-esteem and face are two resources that vary in their ease of accumulation and vulnerability to loss. As a resource, self-esteem carries the advantage of being somewhat under the discretion of the holder. To the extent that individuals want to maintain positive thoughts about themselves, they are likely to selectively elaborate upon any information that is consistent with this

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desire, and downplay any information that is inconsistent with it. This motivation to view oneself positively distorts our ability to accurately process self-relevant information (Epley & Dunning, 2000). As information about the self is considered only after being filtered through the lens of the individual's desires to form a positive evaluation, the individual will rarely encounter information that constitutes a clear threat to the self. Threats to the self have a difficult time getting past the self-evaluation censor, whereas boosts to the self are quickly escorted to the front of consciousness. As such, self-esteem is easily enhanced, but is more difficult to be lost. This biased processing in the favor of positive self-relevant information renders a promotion orientation functional for selfesteem maintenance. In contrast to self-esteem, however, face is more easily lost than it is gained. First, because face is a resource that is earned from others, individuals will only have as much as others are willing to grant them. Because others are unlikely to share the individual's desire that they be viewed positively, evaluations will not be distorted in a self-serving way. Thus a promotion focus is not automatically favored. Furthermore, as Ho's definition highlights, one's face is maintained provided that one's performance is viewed by others as adequate. Failing to live up to the standards associated with one's roles will lead to a loss in face. As it is never completely clear to the individual what others' standards are, nor how their performance is being interpreted, individuals can rarely feel certain that they are clearly transcending these standards. Face is thus rather vulnerable as it can be potentially lost in any occasion where the individual's performance is judged to be inadequate. On the other hand, it can be extremely difficult to enhance one's face. The amount of face that an individual has is prescribed by their role within the group. As such, the way to enhance one's face is to move up the hierarchy and occupy a more prestigious role. However, such promotions are not easily accomplished. Because each person's position is relative to that of others, the advancement of one person within a group is possible only with the relative demotion of others. Fluid movement among members in a hierarchy will breed intragroup competition, and thus weaken interpersonal harmony. It is thus not surprising that societies that emphasize face and hierarchy tend to operate more on seniority systems (e.g., Nakane, 1970), where the hierarchy remains relatively fixed compared with more meritocratic systems. There are few easy opportunities for individuals to increase their face. It is perhaps telling that the one occasion in which Japanese society is highly meritocratic is in the university entrance exam competition. Because the university that one enters has an enormous influence on one's future occupation, students' performance during this competition will largely determine the amount of occupational face that they will earn in their futures (Cutts, 1997). It seems that


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much of the meritocratic sorting of individuals in Japan happens at this one competition, which is played out nationwide. By limiting meritocratic opportunities largely to this one occasion, and having that competition played out on such a large impersonal scale that an individual's success is not so obviously at the expense of someone close to them, the costs to interpersonal harmony are minimized. To summarize, the biased processing of information associated with self-esteem maintenance renders self-esteem to be more easily gained than lost. Self-esteem maintenance should thus be associated with a promotion focus. In contrast, face is more easily lost than it is gained. Whereas an individual runs the risk everyday of potentially losing face by failing to live up to others' standards, there are few easy opportunities available to gain face. The vulnerability of face as a resource should lead to a prevention focus. To the extent that face is a greater concern for East Asians, whereas self-esteem is dwelled upon more in North America, we should see corresponding cultural differences in regulatory focus: that is, East Asians should be relatively more prevention focused and North Americans should be more promotion focused. A few recent studies have been conducted that provide evidence in support of this. For example, Lee, Aaker, and Gardner (2000) found that East Asians viewed tennis games that were framed as opportunities to avoid a loss as more important than North Americans, whereas North Americans viewed the same games when framed as opportunities to secure a win as more important than East Asians. Relatedly, Elliot, Chirkov, Kim and Sheldon (2001) contrasted personal goals among Koreans and Americans and found that avoidance personal goals were more commonly identified among the Koreans than they were among the American sample. Moreover, whereas the presence of avoidance personal goals is associated with lower subjective well-being among Americans these relations did not hold for Koreans (also see Ip & Chiu, 2002). These hypothesized cultural differences in regulatory focus predict that Japanese and North Americans should respond to success and failure in distinct ways. That is, in their search for possibilities of advancement, promotion-oriented North Americans should become especially motivated after encountering a success. Working on one's strengths increases the likelihood of securing future gains. In contrast, prevention-oriented Japanese should be more motivated following failures. Directing efforts towards those areas where one is not performing well works towards correcting one's shortcomings, and thereby reduces the likelihood that one will fall short of others' expectations. Indeed, research reveals that whereas North Americans will persist longer after successes than failures, Japanese persist more following failures than successes (Heine et al., 2001b; also see Hoshino-Browne & Spencer, 2000; Oishi & Diener, 2003). Regulatory focus varies importantly across cultures.

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One important point to note, is that the logic that I propose here for a link between prevention focus and face-maintenance is just one possible equilibrium that can emerge when individuals are concerned about an audience's evaluation of them. I do think that other equilibria are possible when other conditions in the culture are different (see Cohen, 2001, for an excellent discussion of how different cultural equilibria emerge). For example, another way that we can consider the pursuit of face is in honor cultures, such as among males in the U.S. South (e.g., Nisbett & Cohen, 1996) or in the inner-city (Anderson, 1999). The distinctions between honor cultures and face cultures are subtle, as they are both concerned with one's reputation in the eyes of others. However, there seems to be pronounced differences between people from these cultures in terms of their self-enhancing tendencies or promotion orientations (e.g., there is perhaps no greater a contrast with the modest displays of a Japanese office worker than that of the confident swagger of an inner city gang member). One difference between the two kinds of cultures seems to be that in many honor cultures individuals (particularly males) are in competition with each other over vulnerable resources, so an individual must strive to enhance his honor relative to his competitors. The amount of honor that is available is the amount that an individual can successfully claim for himself from others. The more that an individual can claim, the better off he will be, provided that the individual can bear the cost of that claim. In such a situation we might expect that a concern with honor would lead to a promotion orientation. In contrast, East Asian cultures differ from that of these other honor cultures in that the amount of face available is not in direct competition among individuals. The hierarchy of roles within groups is consensually defined and the amount of face available to the individual is tied to the his or her role. Moreover, the expectations associated with these roles are widely shared, and the roles are viewed as largely fixed, and are not open for negotiation (Su et al., 1999). In this context, individuals need not actively strive to claim their face, but instead aspire to live up to the standards of the amount of face that is ascribed by the roles that they occupy. This kind of context should lead to an equilibrium point of maintaining a prevention orientation. In sum, the relations that I am proposing between concerns with face and self-esteem and other psychological processes are dependent on other cultural variables that might affect the equilibria that emerge.

Internal Versus External Frame of Reference Perhaps the most straightforward, and important, way that self-esteem differs from face is with respect to who is doing the evaluating. High self-esteem can only be achieved if individuals view themselves positively. To secure positive self-views people need to be concerned with their own evaluations, and as such, must consider their performance by comparing it to their own standards (which will be determined, in part, by what people assume others' standards to be). I term this


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consideration of oneself from one's own perspective an internal frame of reference. In contrast, face is secured when others view the individual positively. To secure face, people need to be concerned about how others are viewing them, and as such, must consider how they are measuring up to others' standards. I term this tendency to consider oneself from others' perspectives and standards an external frame of reference. These different frames of reference are important components of self-esteem and face, and they require distinct strategies to secure them. Self-esteem maintenance involves a rather straightforward goal. Individuals need to convince themselves that they are good. Aiding them in this important task is an arsenal of self-deceptive tactics: for example, positive views can be increased by elaborating memories of positive events compared with negative ones (Endo & Meijer, in press), rationalizing one's behaviors to render them sensible (Festinger, 1957), choosing an appropriate downward comparison target (Wills, 1981), derogating one's past self to provide one with a favorable contrast (Wilson & Ross, 2001), switching one's focus to one's strengths whenever a weakness is identified (Baumeister & Jones, 1978), affiliating oneself with successful others (Cialdini et al., 1976), trivializing the importance of a setback (Heine et al., 2001b), or rounding their evaluations upwards whenever given the chance (Taylor & Brown, 1988). It is not a surprise that the vast majority of North Americans have high self-esteem (Baumeister, Tice, & Hutton, 1989). If one is sufficiently motivated, this array of self-deceptive tactics can disarm many potential threats to self-esteem. A critical feature of these self-deception strategies, however, is that they are employed to deceive the self, not others. Whereas the self is very cooperative when being misled to think of itself in overly positive terms, others are not so easily swayed. For example, upon witnessing a performer demonstrate less than adequate behavior, the observer is unlikely to call up the same array of possible rationalizations that the performer is. Moreover, no amount of efforts by the performer to deceive themselves will have much effect on the evaluations of the audience. Regardless of how motivated an individual is to view themselves positively, face maintenance hinges on the evaluations of others. Unless the performer is someone who is a close relation of the evaluator that reflects upon their self, heightening the motivation of the evaluator to judge them positively (e.g., Brown, Collins, & Schmidt, 1988; Heine & Lehman, 1997a), performers will likely be evaluated in cold, objective terms, where failures are interpreted simply as failures. Even worse, in many situations evaluators might view performers in overly harsh terms because of the greater impact of negative information (Rozin & Royzman, 2001), a tendency to view performance in dispositional terms (e.g., Ross, Amabile, & Steinmetz, 1977), or by motivations that derive from their own self-deceptive desires to find downward social comparison targets (Wills, 1981). Individuals are in a very vulnerable position when the key source of evaluation moves from the amenable, easily deceived self, to the potentially critical

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perspective of an audience. It would seem that when individuals are concerned about face maintenance and living up to the standards of an audience, the best strategy would be to adopt a perspective that is at least as critical as that of the audience. By identifying behavior that might potentially fall short of others' standards, and by working toward correcting and eliminating these vulnerabilities, the individual is best able to protect their face. The differential emphasis placed on face and self-esteem in different cultures predicts comparable cultural differences in frames of reference. Indeed, recent evidence indicates that East Asians are more likely than North Americans to maintain an external frame of reference. For example, Leuers and Sonoda (1999) compared how Japanese and Americans presented themselves in photographs. A greater concern for an external frame of awareness would be indicated if people made efforts to create a positive impression in the photograph. Indeed, Leuers and Sonoda found that Japanese tended to present themselves in rather polished terms, posing neatly in front of the camera, in a way likely to secure a favorable impression from others. In contrast, Americans were more likely to reveal themselves "warts and all," with less apparent effort to ensure a positive self-presentation. Cohen (this volume) hypothesized that one consequence of adopting an external frame of reference will lead Asians to experience the world more from the perspective of those around them. That is, Asians should view themselves in ways that are consistent with how they are viewed by others. This hypothesized "outside-in perspective" has rather profound consequences on psychological experience: for example, Cohen (this volume) found that Asian-Canadians are more likely to experience third-person than first-person memories for situations in which they were the center of attention. That is, their recall of their past experiences includes much imagery of how they appeared at the time to others imagery which was never accessible to them directly. Their heightened sensitivity of an audience leaks into their memories of themselves. In contrast, Euro-Canadians' memories for themselves at the center of attention showed significantly less of this third-person imagery. Their memories of experiences when they were at the center of attention had more imagery that was consistent with how they originally saw the event. Cross-cultural research on self-awareness also identifies cultural divergences in frames of reference. When individuals are aware of how they appear to others they are said to be in the state of objective self-awareness (Duvall & Wicklund, 1972). That is, they are aware of how they appear as an object, a "me," in contrast, to the experience of being a subject, an "I." It would seem that to the extent that East Asians are aware of an audience, and are adjusting their behaviors to that audience, they should more likely be in a habitual state of objective self-awareness than North Americans. If this is the case then stimuli that enhance objective self-awareness (e. g., seeing oneself in front of a mirror) should


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have little effect on East Asians. Even without a mirror present East Asians should be considering themselves in terms of how they appear to others. A pair of recent cross-cultural studies corroborate this hypothesis: Heine, Takemoto, Sonoda, and Moskalenko (2003) found that whereas Canadians and Americans showed a decrease in self-esteem and an increase in self-discrepancies when they saw their reflection in a mirror (replicating much past research on self-awareness; e.g., Duval & Wicklund, 1972), Japanese self-evaluations were unaffected by the presence of the mirror. Moreover, although North American self-evaluations were much more positive than Japanese when the mirror was not present, they were at relatively similar levels to Japanese when they were in front of the mirror. One reason that self-evaluations tend to be so much more positive for North Americans than Japanese may be that North Americans are less likely to be considering how they appear to others. Objectivity constrains the ability to maintain a positive self-view.

Entity Versus Incremental Theories of Abilities Self-esteem and face are also implicated in the lay theories that we hold about the nature of abilities. One way of thinking about abilities is to view them as arising from a set of relatively fixed and innate attributes. This kind of "entity theory" (Dweck & Legget, 1988) of abilities reflects beliefs in an underlying essence that is tied to abilities. With such a worldview an individual's successes and failures directly reflect upon his or her perceived capabilities and self-worth. Successes indicate the innate talents that are part of the individual, whereas failures reveal unsightly blemishes, which, unfortunately, are perceived as being relatively indelible. It would seem, then, that beliefs in entity theories will be associated with a need for self-esteem. To the extent that abilities are perceived to be largely immutable and reflecting of essential aspects of the individual, having a positive assessment of them would seem to be accompanied by subjective well-being, and would also provide the individual with the requisite confidence to perform at their best on a task. Viewing one's abilities negatively, on the other hand, would seem to be closely tied to depression and would decrease any motivation to improve. There is little reason to try harder if one's failures are perceived to be immutable. A second way of conceiving abilities is to view them as being malleable, and ultimately improvable. This kind of "incremental theory" of abilities reflects a belief in the key role of efforts in abilities. With this kind of worldview successes and failures are seen to be less diagnostic of one's capabilities and self-worth, and more revealing of the extent of one's efforts. Doing poorly on a task does not indicate that one is lacking the potential, but rather that one needs to direct additional efforts to improvement. This suggests that those with incremental views of abilities should not find failures as painful, and successes as

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pleasant, as those with entity theories, and hence performance on tasks should be less tied to their self-esteem. In societies characterized by hierarchical interdependence, such as much of East Asia, incremental views of abilities can become importantly tied to face. As an individual's performance on group-relevant tasks affects the group's success, it becomes critical for individuals to be perceived as doing their best towards what are, in many cases, shared goals of the group. That performance on these group goals is viewed as being so closely tied to efforts means that how hard one works becomes a matter of moral significance. Face, in terms of how the ingroup is evaluating the individual, is influenced by whether the individual is perceived as doing sufficiently well, and is demonstrating concentrated efforts to the group. One's face will be maintained to the extent that one is seen as making efforts to do one's best and maximally contributing to the group's welfare. Some evidence for this moralization of efforts can be seen in the Japanese language. Words related to effort come to take on extremely positive connotations: surveys find that "effort" (doryoku) and "persistence" (gambaru) have been rated as the first and second most popular words in Japanese, respectively (Shapiro & Hiatt, 1989). When employees are finished for the day, the standard words of departure are either "You must be exhausted," or "I am sorry for leaving before you." The extent of the value placed on hard work for the good of others is also evident in cultural practices in the Japanese workplace such as the remarkably high rates of voluntary overtime (e.g., Kumazawa, 1996), tendencies of many to refuse to take their paid holidays (e.g., Harada, 1998), and the occasional instance of death by overwork (karoshi; Nishiyama & Johnson, 1997). Beliefs in the important role of effort in East Asia are also revealed clearly in cross-cultural education research. A number of studies have identified greater tendencies for East Asians compared with North Americans to attribute school achievement to efforts, and not abilities (e.g., Holloway, 1988; Stevenson & Stigler, 1992). Japanese teachers are reluctant to discuss differences in students' abilities, and schools do not track students (Tobin, Wu, & Davidson, 1989). This tendency to explain performance in terms of effort is also evident in cross-cultural studies of self-serving attributions where, often, Japanese explain both successes and failures more in terms of effort than do North Americans (see Kitayama et al., 1995). Cultural differences in the degree that beliefs in the incremental nature of abilities are embraced can be seen quite clearly when participants are asked to estimate the percentage of intelligence that is due to efforts. European-Americans estimated that 36% of intelligence comes from one's efforts, Asian-Americans estimated 45%, and Japanese 55% (Heine et al., 2001b). Culture has an impact on the perceived malleability of the self (but see mixed evidence on cultural comparisons of Likert scale measures of malleability; e.g., Heine et al., 2001b; Hong, Chiu, Dweck, Lin, & Wan, 1999; Norenzayan, Choi, & Nisbett, 2002).


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Furthermore, experimental manipulations of incremental theories of abilities corroborate the cultural differences (Heine et al., 2001b). Leading Japanese to believe that performance on an experimental task is enhanced by effort has no impact on their persistence after failure relative to a control group; they apparently endorse this belief in the absence of the manipulation. In contrast, leading Americans to believe that performance on a task is enhanced by effort leads to significantly greater persistence after failure than a control. Apparently, this manipulation provides novel information for Americans. The opposite pattern holds when participants are led to believe that the experimental task measures innate, stable abilities: that is, Japanese persist significantly less after failure when informed that the task is based on innate abilities (indicating that this is novel information to them), whereas Americans' persistence is unaffected by this information (suggesting that they already possessed this belief). Being sensitive to weaknesses and working at correcting them is only a beneficial strategy if one believes that the weakness is correctable. The greater incremental view of abilities in East Asia is also evident in people's reactions to success and failure. Compared with North Americans, East Asians do not demonstrate as strong a relation between actual-ideal self-discrepancies and depression (Heine & Lehman, 1999; Marsella, Walker, & Johnson, 1973). Likewise, Japanese have a weaker emotional reaction to encounters with success or failure than North Americans (Heine et al., 2001b). The relatively muted reactions to the feedback among Japanese are consistent with them viewing their performance as a reflection of their efforts rather than abilities.

Independent Versus Interdependent Views of Self A final process implicated by concerns with maintaining self-esteem and face is with regard to how people view themselves. One way of considering the self is to see it as a relatively autonomous, self-sustaining, collection of attributes, that is largely independent from others. This independent view of self has been the working model for many of the theories of self that have been developed by a Western-dominated social psychology. In contrast, a second way of construing selves is to see them as being fundamentally interconnected, situationally variable, and grounded in roles and relationships with significant ingroup others. This interdependent view of self has recently become a focus for research, particularly in non-Western cultures, and has been linked to a wide array of distinct phenomena (for reviews see Heine, 2001; Markus & Kitayama, 1991; Triandis, 1989). There are a couple of ways that independence and interdependence would seem to be linked with self-esteem and face maintenance, respectively. First, to the extent that the feelings of identity of an individual with an independent view of self are based on herself and herself alone, it would seem especially important

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for that individual to come to view herself positively. It would be difficult to feel as though she is autonomous and self-sufficient if she did not view herself as competent and talented. It would seem that being able to feel as though one does not have to rely on others and is able to take care of oneself requires that one embraces a relatively positive self-view. In contrast, feelings of identity for individuals with interdependent views of self importantly hinge on their relations with others (Markus & Kitayama, 1991). Elaborating on what is positive about oneself will not serve to increase one's belongingness with others (and indeed, might have the opposite effect; see Paulhus, 1998). Rather, belongingness will be enhanced when significant others are viewing you as desirable, and as contributing satisfactorily toward the ingroups' goals. As such, maintaining one's face should be associated with the maintenance of belongingness. This reasoning suggests that values related to the independent self theoretically should be intimately related with self-enhancement, whereas those related to the interdependent self should be largely unrelated, or even negatively related, to self-enhancement. A variety of studies have measured the correlations between trait independence and interdependence and self-esteem or self-enhancement. These studies have consistently found clear positive relations between independence and positive self-views, regardless of culture, and negative (albeit weaker) relations between interdependence and positive self-views (Heine et al., 1999; Heine & Renshaw, 2002; Kiuchi, 1996; Oyserman, Coon, & Kemmelmeier, 2002; Singelis, Bond, Lai, & Sharkey, 1999. Self-enhancement is related to independence and is opposed to interdependence. A second way that independence and interdependence are differentially related to self-enhancement can be understood by considering the consequences of elaborating a positive self-view. Self-enhancement is associated with both costs and benefits to the individual. Paulhus (1998) makes the case that these benefits and costs are realized in two different domains. First, benefits of self-enhancement tend to be intrapsychic in nature. That is, focusing on what is good about the self tends to be associated with subjective well-being and self-efficacy, and is negatively associated with dysphoria and depression (Taylor & Armor, 1996; Taylor & Brown, 1988). If people are more often considering their strengths than their weaknesses, they will likely experience more rewarding thoughts and warm feelings about themselves. Indeed, positive views of the self show clear and pronounced correlations with measures of positive feelings and subjective well-being (Taylor & Brown, 1988; Taylor & Gollwitzer, 1995). One clear benefit of self-enhancing, then, is that it feels good. However, the intrapsychic benefits that derive from self-enhancement come at the expense of one's relationships. A number of researchers have highlighted how self-enhancers risk attracting the scorn of those around them (Colvin, Block, & Funder, 1995; Exline & Lobel, 1999; Paulhus, 1998; Vohs & Heatherton, 2001; for a contrary view see Taylor, Lerner, Sherman, Sage, &


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McDowell, 2003). To put it simply, most people tend not to particularly like self-enhancers, especially over time. Paulhus (1998) found that after 7 weeks of interacting with each other self-enhancers were less likely to be viewed positively by their peers than were non-self-enhancers. Other research has underscored how positive self-presentations result in the individual being liked less (e.g., Godfrey, Jones, & Lord, 1986; Tice, Butler, Muraven, & Stillwell, 1995). These interpersonal costs are especially evident in long-term relationships (Robins & Beer, 2001), the kinds of relationships that are especially implicated in interdependent selves. The costs and benefits of self-enhancement in these two domains suggests that to the extent an individual places more weight on intrapsychic over interpersonal concerns, self-enhancement would be a beneficial strategy. The positive feelings that arise from self-enhancement will be seen as worth the price of the alienation of those around one. In contrast, to the extent that individuals are more concerned about their interpersonal relationships than their intrapsychic rewards, they should benefit more by self-improvement and face-maintenance. The benefits of deepening their relations with others outweigh the costs of the negative feelings associated with self-improvement. This logic can be extended to cultures. Cultures that place more emphasis on feeling good should make self-enhancement a more beneficial strategy, whereas cultures that place greater relative weight on maintaining harmonious interpersonal relationships should benefit more by self-improvement and face-maintenance. There is considerable evidence that Japanese and North Americans differ in the extent to which they differentially emphasize intrapsychic and interpersonal concerns. First, there is consistent evidence that North Americans report feeling more positive feelings than Japanese (Diener, Diener, & Diener, 1995; Kitayama, Markus, & Kurokawa, 2000; Mesquita & Karasawa, 2002; Oishi, 2002). One way to make sense of this difference is that North Americans tend to elaborate the positivity of their feelings as these are more relevant to a successful life. Suh, Diener, Oishi, and Triandis (1998) find that the experience of positive feelings is more closely tied to subjective well-being for North Americans than Japanese (and between people from individualistic and collectivistic cultures more generally), whereas fulfillment of role expectations is more closely tied to well-being for people from collectivist cultures. Thus, intrapsychic concerns are arguably dwelled on to a greater extent by North Americans. In contrast, the greater importance placed on maintaining harmonious interpersonal relationships in East Asia relative to North America has been discussed in a variety of domains. These concerns are argued to lead to less confrontational and more compromising negotiation strategies, such as bargaining and mediation (Leung, 1987), and to favoring a seniority based system of rewards over a meritocratic system (e.g., Clark, 1979; Nakane, 1970), as the former is associated with less competition among colleagues. Individuals behave such that

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they are more likely to fit in with others (e.g., Kim & Markus, 1999) and adjust their behavior to that of significant others (lyengar & Lepper, 1999; Morling, Kitayama, & Miyamoto, 2002). Hence, some evidence suggests that East Asians tend to emphasize interpersonal concerns more, and intrapsychic concerns less, and thus the cost-benefit ratio of self-enhancing is not as favorable for them relative to North Americans.

Conclusion There are at least two ways that people can aspire towards positive self-views. One way is for the individual to come to view themselves positively, that is, they can possess, enhance, and maintain self-esteem. This motivation is well understood by psychologists, and research investigating it has dominated the pages of social psychological journals. A second way is for the individual to come to be viewed positively by others, that is, they can possess, enhance, and maintain face. This motivation, in contrast, has received relatively little empirical or theoretical attention thus far (see Ting-Toomey, 1994, for an important exception). Whereas both of these motivations are clearly universal in the sense that members from all cultures surely experience both concerns with self-esteem and face, the degree to which these are emphasized varies importantly. Although the pursuit of these two kinds of positive self-views likely reflects a similar underlying concern with becoming a good cultural member, the strategies that one takes to achieve them vary considerably. The pursuit of self-esteem is associated with self-enhancing motivations, a promotion orientation, an internal frame of reference, entity theories of abilities, and independent views of self. These processes all work in concert when individuals are concerned with evaluating themselves positively. In contrast, the pursuit of face is associated with self-improving motivations, a prevention orientation, an external frame of reference, incremental theories of abilities, and interdependent views of self. These processes are all relevant when individuals are concerned with being viewed positively by others in terms of their ability to live up to the standards associated with their roles. These different orientations highlight an issue critical to conceiving of human universals. At some level, it would seem that all human motivations stem from a universal foundation, that is, they are derived from a set of concerns that had adaptive significance in the evolutionary environment. At a distal and abstract level, we can conceive of both self-esteem and face maintenance as ways for people to become good selves and receive beneficial outcomes associated with living up to cultural standards of what a good person is. At a more proximal and concrete level, however, we can see a great deal of cultural variability in the specific psychological processes that are implicated—the level at which most psychological research is conducted. That universal motivations, such as striving


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to become a good cultural member, can express themselves in such culturally divergent phenomena at the proximal level underscores the critical role of both biology and culture in making sense of human nature.

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Ting-Toomey, S. (Ed.). (1994). The challenge of facework: Cross-cultural and interpersonal issues. Albany: State University of New York Press. Tobin, J. J., Wu, D. Y. H., & Davidson, D. (1989). Preschool in three cultures. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Triandis, H. C. (1989). Cross-cultural studies of individualism and collectivism. Nebraska Symposium of Motivation, 37, 41-133. Vohs, K.D., & Heatherton, T.F. (2001). Self-esteem and threats to self: Implications for self-constmals and interpersonal perceptions. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81, 1103-1118. Wills, T. A. (1981). Downward comparison principles in social psychology. Psychological Bulletin, 90, 245-271. Wilson, A. E., & Ross, M. (2001). From chump to champ: People's appraisals of their earlier and present selves. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 80, 572584. Yik, M. S. M., Bond, M. H., & Paulhus, D. L. (1998). Do Chinese self-enhance or self-efface? It's a matter of domain. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 24, 399-406.

Chapter 6

Culture and Lay Theories of Change Li-Jun Ji, Queen's University

Lay Theories of Change People need to understand what is going on in the social world. They develop lay theories or beliefs, sometimes called implicit theories, to help them understand the world, just as psychologists develop theories to help them understand people. People are not necessarily aware of the theories or their impacts, thus lay theories may be implicit and non-systematic (Furnham, 1988), but they play important roles in peoples' everyday lives. For example, implicit theories of personality are found to guide people's interpretations of social behaviors and impression formation (see Chiu, Hong, & Dweck, 1997; Tong & Chiu, 2002). Implicit theories also have been found to be a basis for constructing personal history (Ross, 1989). Researchers have studied lay theories of happiness (Furnham, Cheng, & Shirasu, 2001), lay theories of aging (e.g., Bergstrom & Holmes, 2000; McDonald-Miszczak, Hertzog, & Hultsch, 1995), lay theories of psychotherapy (e.g., Furnham, Pereira, & Rawles, 2001; Najavits, 1997), and lay theories of suicide (Lester, 2001). In this chapter, I focus on lay theories of change, which refer to the theories or beliefs people have regarding the development of events, people, and things. There are two major components in lay theories of change: one deals with the development of events, and the other with relationships among events. The two components are closely related. Specifically, if a linear causal relationship between two events, cause and effect, is assumed, then a linear development for the effect event is very likely to be expected, as long as the cause is constant. In contrast, if associations among many variables are assumed, a linear causal relationship will be difficult to identify, and instead a nonlinear development will be 117

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expected. For example, when trying to understand why a historical event occurred, or why a physical movement occurred, a linear theorist is more likely to believe and look for a single "cause" for the effect. In contrast, a nonlinear thinker is more likely to acknowledge multiple factors that have led to the event or the movement. It is important to note that lay theories of change focus on the developments of the events themselves, without any active involvement on the part of the person who holds the theory. A person who believes that things are changing all the time does not necessarily feel that he/she can change things, and vice versa, a person who believes that he/she can change the world does not necessarily believe that the world is changing all the time. This distinguishes lay theories of change from entity vs. incremental implicit theories (Chiu, Hong, & Dweck, 1997), because the latter are about people's beliefs that they can or can not change things or make a difference. Lay theories of change are believed to influence prediction, interpretation, and judgment/decision making, which then further impact emotion and motivation. Lay theories of change may differ from individual to individual and from culture to culture. In this chapter, I focus on cultural comparisons of lay theories of change, involving comparisons between East Asians (particularly Chinese) and European North Americans. All the comparisons throughout the following discussion are done relatively. In other words, the same ideas may be present in both cultures, but relatively speaking, they are more prominent and more influential in one culture than in the other. Of interest are the typical and predominant tendencies of East Asians and those of North Americans. In addition, even though most of the findings for East Asians are based on Chinese participants, Koreans and Japanese likely share similar lay theories of change (see Nisbett, Peng, Choi, & Norenzayan, 2001). For the Chinese, the predominant lay theory of change is nonlinear, even cyclical. To most Chinese, life is a cycle. This is well reflected in the famous story known to almost every Chinese: Near China's northern borders lived an old man, whose horse ran away. His neighbors came to comfort him, but he said, "How do you know it isn't a good thing?" A few days later, his horse came back, bringing a fine wild horse with it. His neighbors came to congratulate the old man, who said, "How do you know it isn't a bad thing?" A few weeks later, the old man's son tried to ride on the new horse and fell off, breaking his leg. Again,

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the neighbors came to comfort the old man, who said, "How do you know it isn't a good thing?" Some months later, a war broke out. All able-bodied young men were recruited for the war and many of them died as a result. The old man's son did not have to join the war due to his broken leg and survived with his father. Thus, for the Chinese, positive events can lead to negative events, and negative events can lead to positive events. Furthermore, events considered good in one context may be considered bad in a different context. Such beliefs lead to a relatively cyclical lay theory of change. That is, people believe that events are changing all the time and they change in a cyclical fashion. In addition, many events are believed to be associated with one another. For North Americans, in contrast, life is more or less a straight line. A French political philosopher, Bertrand de Jouvenal, wrote in his book, The Art of Conjecture (1967): [We tend] to postulate that tomorrow will be the same as today; likewise, when we are aware of movement, we assume that tomorrow will differ from today in the same way as today differs from yesterday... [Such assumptions] exert a strong sway over our minds. The lifespan of man has become longer; it will become longer still. The number of work hours in the year has decreased; it will decrease yet further. The standard of living has risen; it will rise even more. Whatever the precise reasons given to justify each such assumption, they are brought in only to justify this immediate and spontaneous conviction- things will be that way, for they have already gone that way. The sharper our awareness of a past movement, the stronger our conviction of its future continuation, (p. 61)

Along the same line, Wittgenstein (1980) says, "When we think of the world's future, we always mean the destination it will reach if it keeps going in the direction we can see it going in now; it does not occur to us that its path is not a straight line but a curve, constantly changing

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direction" (p. 3e). This type of thinking, thus, leads to a relatively linear theory of change by North Americans, that is, a belief in either no change, or change only in a linear fashion.

CROSS-CULTURAL EMPIRICAL FINDINGS In this section I present empirical evidence for cross-cultural differences in lay theories of change. Research conducted in my lab has shown that North Americans tend to believe in inertia (i.e., things at rest tend to stay at rest; things in motion tend to stay in motion). In contrast, Chinese people tend to believe that things are changing constantly, and that sometimes the direction of development also changes.

Personal Development In one study (Ji, Nisbett, & Su, 2001), we presented European Americans and Chinese with scenarios and asked them to predict the likelihood that an opposite future event will occur. For example, "Someone has been a chess champion in high school for three years. How likely is it that he will lose to his strongest opponent next time?" We found that in comparison to North American participants, Chinese participants predicted a greater likelihood for change in personal development. Specifically, compared to American participants, Chinese participants thought it more likely that a person growing up in a poor family would become rich someday (66% vs. 53%), and that a person who has been winning would lose the next game (53% vs. 29%) (Ji et al., 2001). This type of oppositional prediction is not only found in Chinese adults, but also among elementary school children in China (Ji, 2003). Chinese children (9 and 11-year-olds) explained that a person who is overly proud after winning games is likely to lose the next game due to lack of continued effort or motivation. In contrast, a person who just lost a game may work hard to catch up, and may win it the next time. Canadian children of the same age showed less of such a tendency. In another study (Ji & Zhang, 2003a), we asked Chinese and Canadian college students to predict what would happen in 10 years, 20 years, and 30 years to a person's traits, abilities, and behaviors. Consistently, we found that Chinese participants believed there would be more change than did Canadian participants in a person's traits, behaviors, and abilities. Furthermore, Chinese made more nonlinear


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predictions than Canadians. Specifically, Chinese predictions included more reversals in direction than did Canadian predictions.

Interpersonal Relationships Similar findings have been obtained for interpersonal relationships (Ji et al., 2001). For example, in comparison to North Americans, Chinese participants reported that a dating couple is more likely to break up in a few years (60% vs. 43%), and that two children on bad terms with each other are more likely to become intimate friends someday (43% vs. 22%). Chinese children also believed that interpersonal relationships change a lot from good to bad, and especially from bad to good (Ji, 2003). They explained that if two children do not get along very well, other people (such as a teacher, or a parent, or a friend) may intervene and talk them into being friends again. Personal Happiness Across Time Lay theories of change also affect how people view the happiness they themselves have experienced and will experience in their lifetime. Relatively speaking, more Americans than Chinese believed that their happiness across time was more or less linear; whereas more Chinese than Americans believed that their life happiness was nonlinear. Thus, for Chinese, one's life experience may change from happiness into unhappiness and from unhappiness into happiness (Ji et al., 2001). Global Events When things are changing, we found that North Americans tended to predict that they would continue to change in the same fashion (i.e., in the same direction and at the same rate). In contrast, Chinese participants predicted more changes in the direction of change and in the rates of change (Ji et al., 2001). For example, when told that money spent on advertising directly to children has been increasing during the past 5 years, Americans predicted that it would continue to increase at a similar rate and in the same direction more than did the Chinese. In addition, more Chinese than Americans predicted reversals in the development of global events. Such cultural differences have been found not only for

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individual behaviors, but also for group and institutional behaviors (such as the behavior of the stock market). Western linear thinking may be linked to the belief that each cause is believed to have an effect, and each effect is tied to a cause, and therefore, each event can be described as an effect of a preceding event or a cause for a consequent event. Nisbett and colleagues (2001) have argued that linear thinking is more congenial to Westerners in part because they have an "analytic" thinking style. Westerners, particularly North Americans, focus on a relatively narrow range of objects and environmental factors and build simple, explicit causal models. Easterners (including Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans) attend to a broader range of factors (Choi, Dalai, Kim-Prieto, & Park, 2003 ; Ji, Peng, & Nisbett, 2000), have a more complex model to understand relationships between events, and, therefore, are more inclined to assume contradiction, change, and a nonlinear development of events.

IMPLICATIONS FOR COGNITION The research on lay theories of change provides a unique perspective for understanding some well documented cross-cultural differences in social cognition, such as person perception, illusion of control, and tolerance for contradiction.

Dispositionism The dominant lay theory of change among Chinese people allows them to have a fluid and open-minded view of people and events. Therefore, they would be less likely than Westerners to think that a liar will always be a liar, or that a noble person will always be noble. Indeed, people change depending on the context. Consistent with this, Norenzayan, Choi, and Nisbett (2000) found that East Asians believed in the malleability of dispositions; whereas North Americans believed that personality traits are fixed. If Chinese believe that people's behavior is context dependent, they would pay more attention to and emphasize the situation more in explaining behaviors than would North Americans. Indeed, Chinese participants, along with other East Asians, have been shown to make more situational attributions than do North Americans (e.g., Norenzayan et al., 2000).


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Note the belief in change or no change may be self-fulfilling-leading to change or no change in reality. If one believes that an event is not going to change, one may not work hard to make change happen. On the other hand, if one believes that an event will change, then one may anticipate it by behaving in a way consistent with the anticipated change. In the context of personality perception, believing that behavior is determined by fixed personality or dispositions may lead a person to expect that significant change in behavior is difficult to obtain with individuals. Such expectation of no change may lead to less motivation and effort for change. As a result, the original belief or theory is confirmed and will continue to guide behaviors. There is evidence suggesting this is happening in clinical settings. If people continually expect no change in a psychological client, and act accordingly, the chance is that the client's troubled behaviors will not change (Bakker, 1975). On the other hand, change can be enhanced by expecting it, working toward it, and by creating an accommodating environment. For example, Rosenthal and Jacobson (1966) found that children from whom teachers expected greater intellectual gains showed such gains in comparison to the students in the control condition from whom teachers had no such expectations. Teachers' expectations influenced their behaviors toward the students, which in turn influenced the students' performance.

Belief in Stability and the Sense of Control Americans tend to believe in the stability of events and people (for exceptions, see M. Ross, 1989). They not only believe that personality does not change much, but they also believe that people's attitudes, such as their political positions, do not change much either. Lowenthal and Lowenstein (2001) explored the question of whether people recognize the instability of their political preferences with a random sample of 219 registered voters in Pennsylvania who were surveyed twice during the 1996 presidential election campaign. The first survey asked about respondents' positions on two political issues (welfare reform and the environment) and on the two major candidates, and participants estimated the likelihood that each of these positions would change during the next two months. The second survey asked about respondents' positions on the same issues at that time and also asked voters to recall their previous positions. Respondents tended to underestimate the degree to which their own positions would change or had changed over time.

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Michael Ross (1989) reviewed several studies in which participants exaggerated the consistency in their attitudes between the present and the past, and underestimated the amount of change that had occurred. For example, Niemi, Katz, and Newman (1980) found that among those respondents who changed their party identification from 1972 to 1976, 91% reported that they did not change. Thus, people recall their political identification as unchanging, even when it has changed. Ross argues that implicit theories of consistency or stability may have contributed to such false memory. The predominant American belief in stability or inertia makes it feasible and relatively easy to understand, and make predictions about, people and events. People can easily make linear predictions based on a trend for a particular time, as long as they can recognize this trend. Such a belief that one can understand and predict others' behaviors or events may naturally lead to a sense of perceived control, sometimes an illusion of control, because beliefs in consistency and stability may lead North Americans to see things as more predictable than they really are and to believe that they have greater control over outcomes than they really do (i.e., illusory control). For example, research has shown that Americans tend to overestimate their ability to predict and control outcomes (see Presson & Benassi, 1996, for a review). The illusion of control might, in turn, reinforce North Americans' beliefs that things are developing in the way they expect-in a linear fashion with no change in the directions and/or rates of change. In contrast, Chinese theories of change and nonlinear change may lead them to see many possibilities, resulting in a weaker sense of control. The limited evidence that is available suggests that Chinese are less subject to the illusion of control. For example, Ji et al. (2000) asked American and Chinese participants to estimate covariations between two objects on a computer screen. Having a sense of control, though such control had no impact on the actual covariations between objects, increased American participants' confidence levels and led them to see more covariations between objects. Control had no such impact on Chinese participants. Similarly, Yamagushi, Gelfand, Miguno, and Zemba (2001) found that American males were more optimistic in a condition in which the numbers they drew individually, versus as a group, would determine their chance of winning a lottery; whereas American females and Japanese males and females were not. This suggests that an individually determined situation may lead to a greater illusion of personal control over the environment for American males.


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Tolerance for Contradiction and Inconsistency Belief in constant and cyclical change may lead Chinese to believe that extreme states can turn into each other, and therefore, the coexistence of these extremes is likely to occur. As a result, Chinese may tolerate contradiction more than do North Americans. There are a great number of Chinese proverbs reflecting the endorsement of apparent contradictions, such as, "True wisdom looks like stupidity," "True eloquence looks like ineloquence," "True courage looks like cowardice," or "The wise man appears like a fool.'1 Peng and Nisbett (1999) found that there are nearly four times as many dialectical proverbs that endorse contradiction and change, in a Chinese proverb book (about 12%) than in an American proverb book (fewer than 3%). In addition, they found that Americans greatly preferred nondialectial to dialectical American proverbs, and that Chinese preferred dialectical to nondialectical Chinese proverbs. When the proverbs were equally unfamiliar, such as those selected from a Yiddish proverb book, Chinese preferred dialectical proverbs more than did Americans. The researchers also presented American and Chinese participants with arguments that appeared to be contradictory. Americans eliminated the contradiction by believing the stronger argument more than they did when presented with no contradictory argument. In contrast, Chinese participants tended to accept both arguments and took an approach representing a compromise between the contradictory arguments. In other words, they did not try to resolve the contradiction but instead accepted it. Peng and Nisbett argue that belief in contradiction is an important part of lay dialectical thinking among East Asians, particularly Chinese, and is much less common among North Americans. Contradiction and inconsistency usually have to be resolved for North Americans, otherwise they would experience cognitive dissonance (Festinger, 1957). They not only value consistency between different cognitions but also value consistency between different aspects of the self. Steven Heine (2001) discussed how the self differs across North America and East Asia. One of the key differences is that for North Americans, the self is perceived as "relatively unchanging and constant across situations." In contrast, compared to North Americans, East Asians have been found to display more inconsistent beliefs about the self across contexts. For example, Choi and Choi (2002) found that, in comparison to European Americans, Korean participants considered themselves more extroverted when asked how extroverted they were than when asked how introverted they were. In addition, they also evaluated their relative honesty differently when asked how honest they were than when asked

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how dishonest they were compared to their peers, suggesting that their view of themselves is more malleable. In contrast, American participants were less affected by the direction of the questions. Thus, North Americans strive for consistency, and consistency is considered to be associated with psychological well being. Suh (2002) found that individuals with consistent multiple views of the self were evaluated more positively by others in the United States but not in Korea. In comparison to North Americans, Koreans viewed themselves as being more flexible across situations. Identity consistency also had less predictive value for Koreans' psychological well being.

Anticipating and Preparing for the Opposite Due to their acceptance of contradiction and the coexistence of opposing ideas, Chinese people developed many proverbs to warn people to be prepared for the opposite. For example, "When you have love (or money, or food), don't forget the time you don't have it (-so treasure what you have)," "Beware of danger when you are safe," "Beware of disaster when you are happy," or, "Check your roof before it rains." One implication of such anticipation is that Chinese may be more likely to look beyond the present, and consider long-term effects more than do North Americans. Ji et al. (2001) presented trends on a graph regarding a variety of events and asked participants to make predictions for the future. American predictions were much more closely based on the last trend on the graph than were Chinese predictions, suggesting that immediately recent or short-term information may be more influential for American predictions than for Chinese predictions. The Chinese belief in change may allow them to look at things holistically and from a long-term perspective, both retrospectively and prospectively. Some readers may wonder whether this implies greater beliefs in continuity among Chinese. If "continuity" means linear continuity, then the answer is no. If "continuity" means relevance between the past and the present, then the answer is yes. A Chinese person with a cyclical theory of change has to look at a broader picture in order to identify some cycles. In contrast, an American person with linear theory of change only needs a bit of information in order to make a prediction of inertia. Ji and Zhang (2003b) presented Chinese and Canadian participants with a list of information that may or may not be helpful for resolving a campus theft case. Chinese participants, in comparison to Canadians, considered more historical information items as relevant, and rated historical information items as more relevant. In contrast,


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Canadians rated the present information items as more relevant than the historical information, though they did not consider more present information items as relevant than did the Chinese. When no present information is available, Canadians' predictions were affected more by relatively immediate information than remote information, whereas Chinese showed no such pattern. Our explanation for the findings is that, for a linear theorist who assumes that things will develop in a linear fashion, he/she needs minimal information for a prediction based on the assumed linear (or unchanging) relationship, which requires only the latest information. In contrast, a cyclical theorist would have to look at a bigger picture to find cyclical relationships.

IMPLICATIONS FOR MOTIVATION AND SUBJECTIVE WELL-BEING Persistence Chinese not only believe in change, but also believe in reversal or cyclical change. Such beliefs may lead them to perceive success and failure in a quite dynamic way, such that failure could lead to success (e.g.,one may learn from failure and work hard to fix previous problems to achieve success) and success could lead to failure (e.g., one may stop trying after success, or indulge oneself in success). Therefore, Chinese people might not give up easily simply because they are currently not successful, nor would they be too content because of success. As is stated in a Chinese proverb, "When you succeed don't be conceited; when you fail don't be dejected." Indeed, such ideas have been socialized and internalized even among elementary school children (Ji, 2003). When told that a child scored last in a contest, most of the Chinese children predicted that the child would do better in the next contest, because he/she would work hard to prepare for it. When told that a child scored first in a contest, most of the children predicted that the child's performance might drop next time, because he/she might be too elated about his/her performance and stop trying so hard. This may remind readers of regression toward the mean. Do the Chinese understand, explicitly or implicitly, regression toward the mean better than do North Americans? This is a question being tested in our ongoing research. Evidence suggests that other Asians, such as Japanese, may share similar beliefs as Chinese. Heine, Kitayama, Lehman, Takata, Ide, Leung, and Matsumoto (2001) found that Japanese who received failure feedback

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persisted more on a similar follow-up task than did those who received success feedback, and Americans showed the opposite pattern. Oishi and Diener (2003) found that European Americans chose to perform the same basketball task if they thought they did well on it on a previous occasion and switched to a different task only if they thought they had previously performed poorly on the basketball task. In contrast, previous performance among Asians did not predict their choice for a subsequent task. Consistently, in a study investigating values, Triandis, Bontempo, Leung, and Hui (1990) found that persistence was valued the most by Hong Kong Chinese participants.

Optimism and Psychological Well-being Cross-cultural findings on optimism and pessimism have been inconsistent thus far (Chang, Asakawa, & Sanna, 2001; Heine & Lehman, 1995). Lay theories of change have offered a new perspective for predicting cross-cultural differences. Having a linear theory of change may lead North Americans to predict less change during their lives. To them, if life changes, it changes linearly in one direction. In contrast, a cyclical theory of change may allow Chinese to predict more change when things are going very well, as well as when things are going poorly. Thus, Chinese may remain hopeful when suffering hardship and remain alert to misfortune when experiencing good fortune. For example, cyclical theorists of change may see failures as antecedents of success. A belief of this kind may lead to eventual success due to greater persistence and efforts. In contrast, it may be difficult for linear theorists to see the positive side of failure, which, in turn, may lead to more negative psychological responses. Thus, Chinese may be expected to be less distressed by negative outcomes and less elated by positive ones. Therefore, they are expected to be less optimistic when experiencing success and prosperity, and more optimistic when experiencing hardship and adversity, as reflected in a Chinese proverb, "Adversity leads to survival, and privilege leads to ruin." The opposite may be expected for North Americans. Consistent with such predictions, Ji, Zhang, and Usborne (2003) found that the same positive events (such as winning a contest or getting a job after tight competition) were perceived as more positive by Canadians than by Chinese, and the same negative events (such as doing poorly on an exam or losing a job) were perceived as less negative by Chinese than by Canadians. In addition, when negative events


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occurred, Chinese endorsed more optimistic responses and less pessimistic responses than did Canadians, though no cultural difference was found for positive events. Research with Western samples has shown a positive correlation between optimism and psychological well-being (Taylor & Brown, 1988). However, following the above reasoning, the relationship between optimism and well-being for Chinese may depend on context. Being overly positive in prosperity may not be considered as good by Chinese, and therefore, the association between optimism and psychological well-being in such a context may not be as strong, or positive at all. Indeed, Ji et al. (2003) found that the correlation between optimism (as measured by the Life Orientation Test) and happiness, and the correlation between optimism and life satisfaction, were stronger for Canadians than for Chinese. When optimism and pessimism were measured in the context of positive and negative events, Canadians showed negative correlations between happiness and their pessimistic responses, to both positive and negative events, and positive correlations between happiness and their optimistic responses to positive events. For Chinese, none of the context-specific optimistic or pessimistic responses was significantly correlated with happiness or life satisfaction.

ARE LAY THEORIES OF CHANGE CHANGEABLE? An interesting question about lay theories of change is whether, and to what extent, these general theories may be changed depending on social contexts and personal experience. If they can be modified or changed, then their impact on cognition, motivation, emotion, and psychological well-being will be significantly affected. One potential reason for changing lay theories of change is developmental. If different cultures cultivate different lay theories of change, children should take time to learn and master such theories. Therefore, among young children, we should observe change in their endorsement of lay theories of change as age increases. Some preliminary finding suggests this happens among elementary school children (Ji, 2003). Another factor for change might have to do with changing social and cultural environments, such as immigrants coming from one culture to another. Different cultural environments may require them to switch to a different set of lay theories in order to better function in the new society.

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People not only learn their lay theories of change from their cultural surroundings, but also may learn from their personal experience. Therefore, even though people may hold a linear theory of change in general, their personal experience with change, and especially nonlinear change may lead them to view things differently in that specific domain (such as stock brokers' experience with stock prices), though this new view may not be easily carried over to other domains. Some immediate experience, such as priming, in a laboratory setting, may have a temporary impact on people's lay theories of change. These possibilities are to be tested.

WHY DO CHINESE BELIEVE IN CONSTANT CHANGE? Perhaps one of the main reasons that Chinese believe that events are changing all the time may have to do with their sensitivity to context. Chinese people believe that the consequences for the same behavior may change from one context to another. Paradoxical as it may seem, such a belief can help Chinese people to avoid undesirable changes. Note here that even though Chinese people believe in change more than North Americans do, they do not necessarily welcome changes. Emphasis on consequences of context change can be found in the following story: In the ancient times, a prime minister from Country Qi visited the king of Country Chu. The Chu king wanted to humiliate the Qi minister. So, at the reception party, the king had his soldiers pass through with a prisoner. The king asked the soldiers, "What crime did this prisoner commit?" "Theft," answered the soldiers. Then the king asked, "where did the prisoner come from?" "Country Qi." The king then turned to the minister, and said, "So, your country must be quite good at producing thieves." The minister answered calmly, "My respected King, don't you know that the oranges that grow on the south of Huai River are sweeter than those on the North? Similarly, people obey laws when staying in Qi, but become thieves when staying in Chu. It is the environment that changes their behaviors." Because of their emphasis on context, Chinese people realize that something that works in one context may not work in a different context, and therefore, changes are inevitable when context changes. The lion might be the king in the forest, but once it moves to a village, it might be bullied by a dog. Powers and skills may work well in one place but become useless in another place. It all depends on the context.


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Thus, Chinese people believe in constant change and cyclical change more than do European Americans. This is not a modern phenomenon. In other words, there must have been cultural differences in lay theories of change in the ancient times. It is clear that the cyclical change idea can be at least traced back to / Ching, a classic book of Chinese philosophy dated back to over 2000 years ago. According to / Ching, the world is made of two basic elements, Yin and Yang. There is Yin in Yang, and there is Yang in Yin. When one declines, the other grows. The relationship between Yin and Yang is circular or cyclical, and the whole world functions based on the relationship between Yin and Yang. Such an idea is also consistent with the belief in harmony between human and heaven. Similar beliefs were missing in Ancient Greek philosophy. Philosophy is a summary of human wisdom based on daily life experience. What led to such differences in ancient philosophy between the east and the west? Such differences could be due to differences in ecology, economy, social systems or structures, and so on (see Nisbett, 2003). Due to their ecological environment, the ancient Chinese people depended on agriculture for living. In order to grow crops, they relied on the heavens (climate), the earth (soil), and people. From very early on, they realized that they were closely related to the natural world, and it was critical to keep a harmonious relationship with the natural world. Such a realization may have directed their attention to the phenomena in the natural world, such as the circular nature of seasons, days and nights, the complementary nature of rivers and mountains with each other, and the cyclical nature of harvest. For example, if one overgrows a crop in a soil, the soil will become impoverished, resulting in low production or no production; after resting for a year or two, the soil can become rich again and produce a good harvest. It is possible that the ancient Chinese started to realize these rules governing the natural world, and thus believed that the same rules could apply in the human social world as well - after all, the social and natural world were one united world in the eyes of the ancient Chinese. Thus, it seems that the ancient Chinese developed their philosophy based on their intuitive experience with the world. In contrast, the ecology of ancient Greece made it easy for their people to make a living by hunting, herding, fishing and trading. Thus, heaven and earth were less important for these people, because their lives were not dependent on them as much as were the lives of the ancient Chinese. Indeed, they made clear the distinctions between the human and the natural world. The idea of harmony between human and nature was foreign to the ancient Greeks. Instead, they developed logic, and based

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their analytical practice on logic, rather than intuition, as in the case of the Chinese.

CONCLUSION In summary, lay theories of change have significant impacts on people's understanding of the world and they are culture-specific. It is worth noting that one lay theory is not necessarily better than the other, because both are products of different social and cultural contexts, as are different reasoning styles. Thus, better grasps of lay theories of change will not only provide a unique perspective for us to understand how people think and reason, but also offer us an opportunity to examine how culture may shape such processes.

Acknowledgments: Preparation of this chapter was supported by the Principal's Development Fund (ARC-PDF) from Queen's University, and a Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) grant. I'd like to thank Jill Jacobson, Lee Fabrigar, Kang Lee, Rod Lindsay, Esther Usborne, and Deanna Messervey for their comments on the earlier versions of this chapter. Notes 1

This means that the real wise person does not show others that he knows everything. Instead he remains quiet, often mistaken as a fool.

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Chapter 7

Interdependent Agency: An Alternative System for Action Shinobu Kitayama and Yukiko Uchida, University of Michigan

Imagine Tom, who has a goal of getting As in all the courses required for premeds because he wants to pursue a career in medicine. He has spent a number of hours studying for these courses, especially right before major exams. His action is clearly agentic in that it is guided by his own intention to act the way he does. This intention is in turn based on his own understanding of the attendant situation. Now consider Tomoko, who has worked very hard for her school work because doing so, for her, is the best way to return obligations to her parents who have worked overtime for the last several years in order to send her to college. Her action is also clearly agentic. To work hard is exactly what she intends to do. Moreover, this intention in turn is grounded in her own understanding of the attendant situation. Although Tom and Tomoko are equally agentic, their respective actions are referenced and anchored in very different sets of meanings. These meanings define a framework or a "field" for defining the actions (Hollowell, 1955; Lewin, 1936). To begin with, Tom constructs his action field in primary reference to goals, desires, emotions, and needs of the self. As a consequence, his agency resides in personal functions of identifying such internal attributes of the self and using them as referents in regulating his own action. Therefore, action is taking the form of influencing the surrounding in accordance with his own desires, needs, and goals (Markus & Kitayama, 1991; Morling, Kitayama, & Miyamoto, 2002; Weisz, Rothbaum, & Blackburn, 1984). Although he may well be aware of his parents' expectations and social norms, he does not think it quite right to refer to these social conditions and concerns in deciding what to do; for doing so is not culturally sanctioned (D. T. Miller, 1999). In contrast, Tomoko is constructing her action field in reference to desires and needs of her parents. Her agency therefore depends critically on interpersonal functions of inferring thoughts of her parents and using them in regulating her own actions. Action therefore is often taking the 137

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form of adjusting to her parents' expectations (Markus & Kitayama, 1991; Morling et al., 2002; Weisz et al., 1984). From a Western perspective, Tomoko might appear to be unwillingly obedient to parental expectations. However, more often than not, there may be a considerable overlap between her own goals and values and those of her parents and, as a consequence, what her parents expect her to do may amount to what she wants to do (but see Kondo, 1990, for subtleties involved in the construction of agency in interdependent form). The focus of this chapter is on these two diverse systems for action. We will show that these two action systems entail a number of contrasting psychological functions and characteristics. For example, they come with quite different motivational tendencies. Because different motivations breed different emotions, these action systems also magnify certain types of emotions in lieu of certain others. Moreover, different patterns of action may demand correspondingly divergent styles of cognition. In the major body of this chapter, we will review evidence for these possibilities.

CULTURE AND SYSTEMS FOR ACTION Agency implies one's ability or power to act in accordance with a set of rules set forth by the person himself or herself (Kant, 1786/1949; quoted in Menon, Morris, Chiu, & Hong, 1999). As implied by this definition, agency is inherently personal as it is best characterized as a force that emanates from the inside core of the person and then guides his or her action toward the environment. Given this definition, the notion of interdependent agency—the type of agency exhibited by Tomoko above—might seem to be an oxymoron at first glance. If agency is personal in nature, how can it possibly be interpersonal and interdependent? We answer this question by arguing that although agency is based on personal judgments, decisions, and intentions, the meanings recruited to form these judgments, decisions, and intentions are quite diverse and variable (Sampson, 1985, 1989). Indeed, a number of theorists have elaborated on how personal strivings and personal intentions can be grounded in interpersonal considerations in Japan and some other Asian cultural contexts (DeVos, 1973; Kakar, 1978; Kondo, 1990; Lebra, 1976; Plath, 1980; Rohlen, 1974; Shweder, 2003; see also Gilligan, 1982 for a similar analysis applied to women in North America). Whereas in some cases, as may well be the case with Tom above, judgments, decisions, and intentions are referenced to personal concerns, goals, and thoughts. In some other cases, as is the case with Tomoko, they may be referenced to concerns, goals, and thoughts that are attributed to significant others in a relationship. Because agency is informed and anchored in a set of meanings that are constantly in flux (Vallacher & Wegner, 1987), it will never be fixed (Gergen & Gergen, 1988). Agency, instead, is actively constructed on-line and, therefore, it

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is constantly updated and changing (Gollwitzer & Moscowitz, 1996). Moreover, all individuals regardless of their sociocultural backgrounds are likely to refer to both personal and interpersonal meanings in constructing their behavioral intentions (Bellah, Madsen, Sullivan, Swidler, & Tipton, 1985). Nevertheless, there is likely to be a systematic cross-cultural variation in how agency is typically constructed (Triandis, 1989). Put differently, models of agency vary across cultural groups, geographic locations, and social classes (Markus & Kitayama, 2004).

Independent Agency According to the independent model of agency, the self is defined primarily in terms of attributes that are internal to it such as his or her own goals, desires, needs, personality traits, and abilities (Markus & Kitayama, 1991, 2004). Many objects and events that are present in the environment, especially other individuals, are made meaningful in reference to the person's internal attributes such as his or her own goals, needs, and desires. The stimuli that are made meaningful in such personal terms constitute the field for action for each individual. This action field, in turn, provides a framework for organizing thoughts, directing actions, and configuring emotions. Within this scheme of construction, action often takes the form of control—namely, to influence other individuals and/or objects in the environment in accordance with one's own desires, needs, and goals. This style of agency, called the independent agency, tends to be quite dominant and widespread in European-American middle-class cultures.

Interdependent Agency There is a different model of agency that is alternative to the independent model. According to this alternative, called the interdependent model, the self is defined in primary reference to a relationship of which it is part (Markus & Kitayama, 1991, 2004). Goals, desires, and needs of others in a relationship are just as important as one's own. Moreover, those of the others and those of the self are coordinated in such a way that they are hardly separable. For example, remember Tomoko, whose goal to study hard had already incorporated her parents' expectations for her. Both self and others are made meaningful in terms of the coordinated network of goals, desires, and needs of different individuals in a relationship. Within this mode of construction, action often takes the form of adjustment—namely, changing one's own behaviors in accordance with the expectations and needs attributed to others in a relationship. This style of agency, called the interdependent agency, tends to be quite dominant in East Asian cultures.

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A thorough examination of cultural variation in the mode of agency is urgently needed. Because modern psychology has been developed in European-American, and mostly middle-class cultures, it should not come as any surprise that the independent form of agency has received considerable research attention. The interdependent form of agency has not received its due. This is problematic because when interpreted within the independent perspective, interdependent forms of agency are often cast in a rather pejorative light (Markus & Kitayama, 1994). For example, as illustrated by Tomoko's behavior above, changing one's action so as to fit-in to expectations of someone else can be quite agentic, commendable, and satisfying (Morling et al., 2002; Weisz et al., 1984). Yet, from the independent perspective, behaviors like these are typically seen as a passive conformity that involves a suppression of one's individual desires and needs. These behaviors, then, are supposedly maladjusted and people who willingly engage in these behaviors may be seen as weak and even irresponsible (Markus & Kitayama, 1994).

From Explicit Self-Knowledge to Implicit Action Tendencies of Self A number of cross-cultural studies conducted during the last decade or two have examined cultural variation in explicit beliefs about the self. In a typical study, paper-and-pencil scales of independent and interdependent construals of self or, equivalently, those of individualism and collectivism (e.g., Hofstead, 1980; Hui, 1988; Singelis, 1994) are administered to people sampled from different cultural groups. The researcher then seeks to determine whether the mean scores of the two scales might be lined up across cultures in a theoretically predicted direction. From these studies, it has become increasingly clear that the means are roughly lined up in a theoretically predicted manner, with North Americans higher than East Asians in independence or individualism and lower in interdependence or collectivism. But exceptions are numerous (Oyserman, Coon, & Kemmelmeier, 2002). Overall, it seems safe to conclude that cross-cultural differences in explicit self-beliefs are often quite marginal. This state of affairs is in stark contrast with a more modest number of studies that use experimental methods to investigate cross-cultural variation in self-related psychological tendencies. As we shortly review, by focusing on implicit psychological tendencies, it has been not only possible, but also quite commonplace to uncover sizable cross-cultural variations in self. It is instructive to note that in investigating regional differences in violence within the United States, Nisbett and Cohen (1996) have largely focused on implicit, action-related measures rather than explicit, attitude measures. In an attempt to "replicate" Nisbett and Cohen's behavioral findings with explicit attitudinal measures, however, D'Andrade (2003) failed to recover any of them.


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Because in the psychological literature cultural differences have often been presumed to be a superficial overlay on more basic psychological processes (see Shweder & Bourne, 1984, for a review), it might seem surprising, at first glance, that cross-cultural variation of the self can be uncovered most clearly, and in the greatest magnitude, not in explicit beliefs about the self, but rather in implicit action-related tendencies. There is a good reason for this, however (Kitayama, 2002). The reason is related to the fact that the set of rules, assumptions, and other meanings that comprise any given culture is often tacit. For example, someone from Culture X and another person from Culture Y may have an explicit belief that they are quite independent. However, exactly what it means to be independent may vary across cultures. Thus, whereas "expressing one's view when asked" might be a clear sign of independence in cultures where people rarely express their opinions even when asked, the same behavior might be an equally clear sign of the lack of independence in cultures where people are quite opinionated so that they express their views even without any solicitation. This example illustrates how the modal behavioral patterns, as actualized and routinized in cultural practices, may vary systematically across cultures and, yet, they can never be fully captured in each individual's explicit self-cognitions. Notice these modal behavioral patterns or cultural practices—referred to by Bruner (1990) as the canonical scripts of culture—serve as the standard of cognitive judgment. Accordingly, the standard in making an explicit cognitive judgment of independence, for example, may be quite variable across cultures in accordance with practices and routines held in place in each culture (Heine, Lehman, Peng, & Greenholtz, 2002). Direct comparison of means across different cultures, then, should be expected to be quite difficult. Moreover, the standard of judgment itself is often invisible -within any given culture because no other comparisons are typically available. This implies that even when there is a massive cross-cultural variation in behavioral tendencies in independence (or for that matter, in any other behavioral characteristics), one may predict little or even no cross-cultural variation in explicit self-beliefs about it (Heine et al., 2002; Kitayama, 2002). The possibility that cultural variation in self is much more pronounced and reliable, not in explicit beliefs, but rather in implicit behavioral or action-related psychological tendencies suggests that culture is insinuated quite deeply into the psychological systems of action control—the systems that do not always reach the threshold of conscious awareness (Nisbett & Wilson, 1977). Recognizing this point makes it obligatory to move away from attitudinal surveys to controlled experimentation as we further explore the nature of the culture-psychology interface. It is quite imperative to investigate cognition, emotion, and motivation as they operate on-line. By shifting our emphasis from self to agency, we would like to highlight this new direction of research on cultural variation of psychological processes and functions.

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The best hope for a better cross-cultural understanding, both within and outside the academic discourse, stems from a conceited effort to study the interdependent agency from an interdependent perspective. Such studies require an in-depth understanding of the respective cultures' meanings and practices involving self, other, and social relations. These meanings and practices as a whole constitute ways of life (Bruner, 1990). These ways of life define the behavioral field (Hallowell, 1955) in which all systems for action and actions themselves are constructed. Fortunately, in the recent years an increasing number of empirical studies have examined interdependent agency within a theoretical framework that acknowledges interdependence as an alternative, equally viable frame for constructing self, others, and social relations (see e.g., Kitayama & Duffy, 2004; Markus & Kitayama, 2004, for reviews). In this chapter, we draw on this emerging literature and review empirical evidence pertaining to the two forms of agency proposed here. We suggest that depending on the types of agency that are constructed in a given cultural context, many social psychological phenomena including many motivational processes (e.g., dissonance and intrinsic motivation), emotional processes, and cognitive processes that implicate self, others and social relations can take cross-culturally divergent forms. We then conclude that the two forms of agency are distinct and, moreover, that each of them is associated with an equally genuine, yet different subjective experience of the self.

EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE Whether independent or interdependent, agency is constituted by a complex system of psychological processes that are recruited to construct an action (e.g., Bandura, 1989; Gollwitzer & Moskowitz, 1996; Heckhausen, 1991; Kuhl & Beckmann, 1985). First, this implies that the two forms of agency should differ in the specific mechanisms by which action is formulated, directed, and regulated (Heine, Kitayama, Lehman, Takata, Ide, Lueng, & Matsumoto, 2001). This difference in action regulation or, more specifically, motivation in general, should be accompanied by corresponding differences in other functions of the self. Thus, it is quite likely that different sets of emotions are evoked and habitually primed depending on the nature of action fields that are constructed by the respective types of agency (Mesquita & Ellsworth, 2001). Moreover, in order to act, one will have to selectively attend to that part of the environment that is most relevant for the action. The requirement for divergent modes of attention may entail substantial consequences on cognition in general (Kitayama & Duffy, 2004; Nisbett, 2003). In what follows, we summarize evidence for each of these points, starting with motivational processes.


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Motivation The primary function of agency is to direct, regulate, and energize one's own thought, feeling, and behavior. Although motivation is ubiquitous in all cultures, ways in which it is configured depends on culturally characteristic ways in which the action field is organized. Thus, the two forms of agency proposed here are likely to entail quite different motivational characteristics. When the action field is organized in terms of goals, desires, and needs of the person himself or herself, individuals will be strongly motivated to pursue these internal attributes of the self and actualize them in action. Many social motivations are likely to be anchored in the eventual affirmation of the independence of the self. But when the action field is organized in terms of expectations and needs attributed to others in a relationship, individuals will be strongly motivated to accommodate and fit-in to these others' expectations and needs. Many social motivations are thus likely to be anchored in the eventual affirmation of the interdependence of the self. In this section, we illustrate this point by focusing on two mutually related topics, namely, choice and dissonance. Choice and Intrinsic Motivation. Although choice is wide-spread in all societies and cultures, it may entail very different functions and psychological and interpersonal consequences depending on how it is socially defined and personally experienced. Two prototypical cases may be distinguished. At one extreme, individuals may make a choice by referring to their own preferences. The choice that is made in this way becomes expressive of the person who has made it. No doubt, this form of choice is widespread in all cultures, but it is far more pervasive and taken for granted in European-American, independent cultures. Indeed, in these cultural contexts, environments appear to come prepackaged in terms of an array of choices to be made in this self-expressive fashion. At the other extreme, individuals may make a choice by referring to desires, expectations, and needs of someone else in a relationship. For example, when a parent chooses a certain cloth for her child, her primary consideration will be whether the cloth is good for the child or whether the child will like it. The choice that is made in this fashion signifies certain relational attitudes such as care and love extended by the chooser. Again, this meaning of choice is also pervasive and widespread across cultures. But we anticipate it to be more dominant and widely practiced in Asian, interdependent cultures. Depending on which meaning and function of choice are widely shared in a given cultural context, choice may entail very different psychological consequences. We suggest that in European-American, independent cultural contexts, choice is seen as an expression of the self's internal attributes such as preferences and attitudes (Iyengar & Lepper, 1999). Making a choice, therefore, is to express the self. In these cultural contexts, then, through making a choice,

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individuals may come to experience their own agency much more clearly and vividly. If, for example, I choose to work on a given task, this must be because I wanted to work on it. If, however, I choose not to work on the same task, this must be because of my desire not to work on it. Quite consistent with this line of analysis, a large number of studies conducted in North American middle-class populations have demonstrated that by freely choosing to work on a given task, individuals are often motivated to work harder (Deci & Ryan, 1985; Iyengar & Lepper, 1999). Conversely, deprivation of free choice can be psychologically quite costly, producing a strong reactance (Brehm, 1966). In contrast, in Asian, interdependent cultural contexts, choice will become relevant to the self primarily when it is made in reference to someone else in a relationship. When it is made outside of such interpersonal contexts, it may carry little or no personal significance for the self. In Asian cultures, then, choice may not necessarily invigorate one's personal motivation to work on a task at hand. Suppose, however, that a choice is made in a meaningful social relationship for someone else. As we shall see shortly in the self-justification section, there is evidence that such interpersonal choice can be quite engaging for those with interdependent (but, perhaps not independent) agency (Hoshino-Browne, Zanna, Spencer, & Zanna, in press). Further evidence indicates that Asians may be quite motivated to work hard on a task when the task is chosen by their significant other. Specifically, Iyengar and Lepper (1999) showed that Asian children were highly motivated to work on a videogame involving a spaceship when the color of the spaceship was chosen by their mother, as compared to either when they chose the color by themselves or when a stranger made the choice. This is in sharp contract with the pattern for European-American children, who worked most when they chose the color of the spaceship by themselves and least when their mother made the choice. Quite consistent with earlier suggestions by DeVos (1973), Lebra (1976), Yang (1986), and other observers of Asian cultural patterns, Iyengar and Lepper's finding may suggest that Asian achievement motivation is socially oriented (Kitayama & Markus, 1999; Heine et al., 2001). They may be motivated to accomplish what significant others are expecting them to accomplish. According to this interpretation, the mother's act of choosing the color of spaceship might have subtly conveyed to the child the mother's high expectations, care, and willingness to guide him or her. Self-Justification-Personal and Interpersonal Dissonance. One unique consequence of the two modes of agency can be found in cognitive dissonance processes. Some recent studies have investigated this possibility by focusing on a free-choice dissonance paradigm (Brehm, 1956). In choosing between two objects, people may have to give up positive features of the rejected object and accept negative features of the chosen object. Researchers have hypothesized that the


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resulting awareness that the choice might not be ideal may threaten significant aspects of the self, such as perceived competence and efficacy, and thereby induce discomfort called dissonance (Aronson, 1968; Cooper & Fazio, 1984; Festinger, 1957; Steele, 1988; see also Harmon-Jones & Mills, 1999 and Stone & Cooper, 2001, for further theoretical refinements). People are then motivated to reduce this dissonance by justifying their choice (Brehm, 1956). To do so, they often increase their liking of the chosen object and decrease their liking of the rejected object—an effect known as the post-decisional spreading of alternatives. Kitayama, Snibbe, Markus, and Suzuki (in press) proposed that self-threats can have two distinct sources. In some cases, threatening evaluations may be solely based on the person's own judgment about him or herself. But in other cases, threatening evaluations may be primarily based on others' appraisals. Correspondingly, awareness that a choice may not be ideal can lead to two distinct identity-related concerns. On the one hand, one may doubt one's own competence or efficacy ("Am I foolish to have made this choice?"). On the other hand, one may worry about what others might think about the choice one has made ("Would they think I am a fool because of the choice I made?"). The analysis on the two modes of agency suggests that these two concerns—personal and interpersonal—may be differentially threatening, depending on the predominant mode of agency as either independent or interdependent. Whereas personal concerns will be quite threatening for those with independent agency, interpersonal concerns will be much more important for those with interdependent agency. Existing evidence is consistent with the foregoing analysis. To begin with, Heine and Lehman (1997) found that Japanese showed no dissonance effect in the standard free-choice paradigm. In this and most other standard free-choice studies, however, participants made choices in total privacy, in a situation set up by a stranger. In these circumstances, it seems very unlikely that one would experience interpersonal worry. Other evidence indicates that Asians may show dissonance effects when their behaviors are made public, as public scrutiny may produce worries about interpersonal rejection. For example, Sakai (1981) used an induced compliance paradigm and found that Japanese showed dissonance effects only when they were led to believe that peers were monitoring their behaviors. More germane to the present analysis is a recent study by Hoshino-Browne et al. (in press), in which Canadians of either Asian or Caucasian heritage made choices for either themselves or a friend in the standard free-choice dissonance paradigm. Participants understood that their friends would know which choice they made. Replicating Heine and Lehman's (1997) results, these authors found that Asian Canadians, especially those strongly identified with Asian culture, showed no dissonance effect when they chose for themselves. Importantly, however, when they chose for their friends, they justified the choice by indicating after the choice

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that their friends would like the chosen object more and the rejected object less than they had indicated before the choice. In a recent series of experiments, Kitayama, Snibbe, and colleagues (in press) went a step further and reported evidence that even when there is no realistic possibility of public scrutiny, interdependent selves experience dissonance when social cues associated with such scrutiny are made salient. That is to say, Japanese participants justified their choice (by increasing liking for chosen items and decreasing liking for rejected items) in the standard free-choice dissonance paradigm only when self-relevant others were primed, either by questionnaires or by incidental exposure to schematic faces. In the absence of these social cues, Japanese participants showed no dissonance effect. In contrast, European Americans justified their choices regardless of the social cue manipulations. For example, in their Study 2, right before making a choice among CDs one group of respondents were asked to think what their peers in their university might think about the CDs at hand (called the other reference condition). Another group of respondents made a choice without this manipulation that was designed to bring to mind socially relevant others (called the standard condition). The dependent variable was the sum of both a rank increase for a chosen CD and a rank decrease of a rejected CD. Positive scores for this sum would demonstrate self-justification at work. The results are shown in Figure 7.1. As predicted, North Americans justified their choice afterward regardless of the social priming manipulation. In contrast, Japanese justified their choice afterward only when the social others had been primed. It is instructive to integrate the dissonance studies with the choice studies reviewed earlier. On the one hand, those with independent agency may work most hard on a task they have chosen by themselves, while showing no or even reduced interest in a task chosen by someone else or a task they choose for someone else. On the other hand, those with interdependent agency may work most hard on a task someone close chooses for them or on a task they choose for someone else, while showing a diminished interest in tasks of their own choice. Together, social embeddedness or the network of interpersonal relations is critically constitutive of interdependent agency. But independent agency appears to be striving to be literally independent of such a social network. Paradoxically, however, this sense of independence is also socially afforded, made possible through cultural tasks of insistently demarcating the self from others, evaluating the self positively, and then actively influencing the others (Kitayama, Markus, Matsumoto, & Norasakiomkit, 1997; Morling et al., 2002).

Emotion The two forms of agency proposed here are likely to entail quite different emotional characteristics. Because they have very different goals, needs, and


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Figure 7.1 Post'choice justification for Japanese and Americans in the two experimental conditions (drawn on the basis of data reported in Kitayama, Snibbe, Markus, & Suzuki, in press)

agendas for life, they are likely to respond to seemingly similar social situations with correspondingly different emotions (Kitayama, Karasawa, & Mesquita, in press; Mesquita & Ellsworth, 2001). Moreover, these forms of agency are based on culture-contingent models of self. These models of self specify what it means to "be well." If the idea of "being well" varies, the experience of well-being and happiness will also vary (Uchida, Norasakkunkit, & Kitayama, in press). Experience of Engaging and Disengaging Emotions. Emotions are typically experienced when one's own goals and desires are either accomplished or blocked (Mesquita & Ellsworth, 2001). Accordingly, the intensity of experiencing different emotions should depend very much on specific ways in which the action fields are construed and organized. When the action field is organized in terms of acts of independence such as self-expression and personal achievement, individuals will be strongly inclined to experience emotions that result from either accomplishment of one's independence (e.g., pride and feelings

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of self-esteem) or blocking of it (e.g., anger and frustration). These emotions are called socially disengaging emotions (Kitayama, Karasawa, & Mesquita, in press; Kitayama, Markus, & Kurokawa, 2000). In contrast, when the action field is organized in terms of acts of interdependence such as interpersonal harmony and reciprocity, individuals will be strongly inclined to experience emotions that result from either accomplishment of one's interdependence (e.g., feelings of closeness and respect) or blocking of it (e.g., guilt, feelings of indebtedness). These emotions are called socially engaging emotions. In order to investigate these possibilities, Kitayama, Mesquita, and Karasawa (2003) prepared both positive and negative emotions that are either socially engaging (e.g., friendly feelings and guilt) or disengaging (e.g., pride and anger). In their first study, the researchers asked both Japanese and American college students to remember the latest incident that fitted with each of 22 situational descriptions. Some of the situations were clearly positive (positive interaction with friends); whereas some others were clearly negative (problem with a family member). In each incident they remembered, participants reported how strongly they felt each of the emotions. Preliminary analysis showed that emotions that are matched in pleasantness with the attendant situations were much more strongly experienced than those that were unmatched. Thus, results were analyzed separately for the emotions that were matched and those that were unmatched. To begin with, when unmatched to the pleasantness of the attendant situations, emotions were not strongly experienced regardless of their social orientations (engaging vs. disengaging). However, as predicted, when emotions were matched in pleasantness with the attendant situations (i.e., positive emotions when the situations were pleasant and negative emotions when the situations were unpleasant), there was a highly significant interaction between culture and the emotion social orientation (engaging vs. disengaging). As can be seen in Figure 7.2, Japanese reportedly experienced engaging emotions such as friendly feelings and guilt more intensely than they reportedly experienced disengaging emotions such as pride and anger. Conversely, Americans reportedly experienced disengaging emotions more intensely than they reportedly experienced engaging emotions. Kitayama, Mesquita, and Karasawa (2003) replicated this pattern with a diary method in their second study. This evidence indicates that cultural variation in emotional experience can be fruitfully analyzed in terms of the social orientation (i.e., the self s engagement or disengagement with others) that are associated with each different emotion. Specifically, those with independent agency are prone to organize their emotions in terms of their own personal needs and goals and, as a consequence, they are constantly primed to the experience of socially disengaging emotions such as pride, self-esteem, anger, and frustration. In contrast, those with interdependent agency are prone to organize their emotions in terms of expectations and other thoughts they attribute to close others and, as a consequence, they are constantly


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Figure 7.2 Average reported intensity of experiencing engaging (e.g., friendly feelings and guilt) and disengaging emotions (e.g., pride and anger) that are matched in pleasantness to the 22 hypothetical emotion-evocative situations (drawn on the basis of data reported in Kitayama, Mesquita, & Karasawa, 2003)

primed to the experience of socially engaging emotions such as friendly feelings, respect, guilt, and feelings of indebtedness. Predictors of Subjective Well-Being and Happiness. The two forms of agency discussed here are defined in terms of quite different attributes or aspects of the self. Whereas the independent agency is primarily defined in terms of the self s internal attributes, the interdependent agency is most importantly defined in terms of its relational characteristics. Accordingly, these respective aspects of the self should figure prominently in the experience of happiness and well-being for the respective forms of agency. Whereas those with independent agency would experience happiness and well-being when their internal attributes are affirmed, those with interdependent agency would experience happiness and well-being when their relational attributes are affirmed (Uchida et al., in press).

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Recent cross-cultural studies on happiness and well-being (Diener & Suh, 2000) are consistent with this line of analysis. This literature has identified self-esteem as a major predictor of subjective well-being and happiness across cultures. As may be predicted, however, the significance of self-esteem is far greater in Western, individualist societies than in Eastern, collectivist societies (Diener & Diener, 1995). Following this earlier work, Kwan, Bond, and Singelis (1997) examined the relative importance of self-esteem and relationship harmony in predicting life satisfaction in Hong Kong and the United States. Relationship harmony implies the degree to which the person feels harmoniously connected with others in a relationship. As may be expected, Kwan and colleagues found that self-esteem was more important in the United States than in Hong Kong, whereas relationship harmony was more important in Hong Kong than in the United States Indeed, in the United States self-esteem was the only reliable predictor of life satisfaction, whereas in Hong Kong, relationship harmony was as important as self-esteem in predicting life satisfaction. More recently, Uchida, Kitayama, Mesquita, Reyes, and Morling (2003) examined both self-esteem and perceived emotional support from close others as potential predictors of happiness among college students. Regression analysis suggested that in the United States, the main predictor of happiness was self-esteem, and emotional support led to an increment of happiness only when it enhanced self-esteem. In two Asian countries (Japan and the Philippines), however, emotional support did enhance happiness even in the absence of any increment in self-esteem. Furthermore, Study 2 replicated the main findings of Study 1 among non-student, middle-aged adults, using additional measures of well-being (a feeling of unhappiness, physical symptoms, and life satisfaction). Finally, researchers have observed conceptually similar cross-cultural differences by examining both frequency and intensity of experiencing a variety of different emotions. In a series of studies, Kitayama and colleagues (Kitayama, Markus, & Kurokawa, 2000 and Kitayama, Mesquita, & Karasawa, 2003) asked both American and Japanese college students to report how much they experience a variety of different emotions. In one study, participants were asked about the general frequency of experiencing them. In other studies, however, they were asked to report the intensity of experiencing the emotions in a variety of different social situations. Regardless of the measures used, for Americans general positive emotions such as happiness and elation were more strongly related to the disengaging positive emotions such as pride and self-esteem than to the engaging positive emotions such as friendly feelings and feelings of respect. In contrast, for Japanese, happiness and other general positive emotions were more strongly related to the socially engaging positive emotions (e.g., friendly feelings and respect) than to the socially disengaging positive emotions (e.g., pride and self-esteem).


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Cognition Because the two forms of agency proposed here have different goals, needs, and agendas for life, they are likely to encourage correspondingly different patterns of attention to self and others. In other words, depending on the forms of agency, what people notice in the environment may vary, with consequences on the nature of representations they develop for self, others and social relations (Kitayama & Duffy, 2004). Moreover, these patterns of social cognition may be reinforced by more basic or nonsocial attentional biases that are also fostered by culture through socialization processes. Attention to Self and Others. When the action field is organized in terms of goals, desires, and needs of the person himself or herself, one's attention will be allocated primarily to these internal attributes of the self and using them in assigning meanings to a variety of objects, people, and other events in the action field. In contrast, when the action field is organized in terms of expectations and other characteristics of significant others in a relationship, one's attention will be allocated primarily to the attributes that belong to the significant others. Other objects and events, even the self itself, may then be interpreted and made meaningful in reference to these others. In support of this analysis, a recent study suggests that those with interdependent agency habitually form highly elaborate representations of partners of social interaction. Specifically, Kitayama, Uchida, Mesquita, and Saito (2003; Study 1) examined how North Americans and Japanese might remember their own social behaviors directed to someone else. In recollecting such a behavior, individuals typically report both what they did and the state of the person to whom the behavior was directed. Our analysis implies that there should be a sizable cross-cultural variation in terms of which of the two components is more elaborated and richly represented in memory. Whereas for Americans their own characteristics would be quite elaborated in memory, for Japanese the state of another person would be more elaborated. In order to test this prediction, Kitayama and colleagues asked Japanese and American undergraduates to remember and describe situations in which they provided a certain act of support to someone they knew. These descriptions were divided into two separate components depending upon whether the contents related to the self or the partner of the social interaction. Figure 7.3 shows the average amount of description for the self and the partner. A significant two-way interaction demonstrates that whereas memory of the partner was more elaborate for Japanese than for Americans, memory of the self was more elaborate for Americans than for Japanese.

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Figure 7.3 Average proportion of the words used to describe one's own actions and one's interaction partner's states (drawn on the basis of the data reported in Kitayama, Uchida, Mesquita, & Saito, 2003)

Those with interdependent agency may develop highly elaborate representations for their interaction partners in part because of their propensity to take their partners' perspectives. It is likely that the perspective taking is strongly encouraged by the culturally sanctioned task of adjusting the self to expectations, needs, and desires of these others. Initial support for this analysis comes from a recent study by Cohen and Gunz (2002). These researchers asked Canadians of either Caucasian or Asian decent to remember various social episodes. The respondents were to indicate whether or not the visual scene of each of the episodes included the self. It was observed that whereas Caucasian Canadians tended to remember the episodes as they see them (and, therefore, the episodes they remembered tended not to include themselves), Asian Canadians tended to remember the episodes from a third-person perspective (and, therefore, the episodes they remembered tended to include themselves).


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In a subsequent study, Cohen and Gunz (2002) explored further implications of the hypothesis that Asian Canadians are more likely than Caucasian Canadians to take another's perspective in social perception. They reasoned that when observing another person, Caucasian Canadians use their own perspective and, as a consequence, they project their own emotions onto this other person. Thus, for example, when feeling angry, they may perceive anger in the other person. In contrast, the researchers argued that in similar circumstances, Asians construct another person's perspective so that seen from this constructed perspective their own psychological state makes sense. Hence, these individuals attribute to the other person emotions that are complementary to their own. For example, when feeling angry, Asians would seek to infer what the other party might be feeling if it is responding to their own anger. In this case, they would assign fear to the other. Participants were first induced to experience one of several different emotions and then shown a face of neutral emotional expression. They were to indicate what emotions this stimulus person might be feeling. In support of the above line of analysis, Caucasian Canadians projected their own emotional states to the target person; but Asian Canadians attributed complementary emotions to this person. Perception of Reciprocity. If those with interdependent agency develop highly elaborate representations of others in a relationship and, moreover, if they tend to see themselves in a way the others are seeing them, there may be a highly calibrated perception of who did what to whom. That is, social perceptions tend to be highly shared and consensual within a relationship. For example, what I regard as support to another person may well be recognized likewise by this second person. In the absence of attentional attunement to one another within a relationship, there may be little or no calibration like this. That is, what I regard as support to another person may or may not be recognized as such by this other person. Kitayama, Uchida, Mesquita, and Saito (2003; Studies 2- 4) examined the hypothesis that perceptions of emotional support that is exchanged within a close relationship are much better calibrated and thus shared in Japan than in the United States. American and Japanese pairs of close friends were presented with many types of emotional support. They were asked to indicate both the degree to which they provided each type of support to the other person in the pair (i.e., "I cheer him/her up when he/she is depressed") and the degree to which they received it from the other person in the pair (i.e., "he/she cheer me up when I am depressed"). As predicted, in Japan each respondent's report of the receipt of support was highly correlated with his or her partner's report of the provision of the same type of support (.59 > rs > .42). These correlations demonstrates that there is a high degree of consensus regarding the nature and extent of emotional support that is exchanged in a relationship. Importantly, in the United States the correlations

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were negligible (.25 > rs > -.00), indicating that there is little or no consensus among individuals regarding the nature of support that is exchanged in their relationship. Nonsocial Perception. So far, we have suggested that those with interdependent agency tend to organize their world in reference to others in a relationship. As a consequence, they tend to be quite attentive to the others and, moreover, they tend to develop an intersubjective representation of the relationship that encompasses both themselves and these others. This style of representing the social world may be appropriately called holistic (Nisbett, Peng, Choi, & Noreiizayan, 2001). In contrast, those with independent agency tend to use their own goals, needs, and desires to decide which of many elements of the social world to attend to and, as a consequence, their understanding of the social world tends to be quite subjective. This style of representing the social world may lend itself to an analytic mode of thought, where objects of attention are selected in reference to the self's judgment about their relative significance and value. Moreover, the objects that are selected for one's attention are processed in respect to the goals and desires of the self. It is likely, then, that attention of those with independent agency is more focused and less holistic than attention of those with interdependent agency. Recent evidence suggests that these attentional biases can be readily found not only in social domains, but also in certain nonsocial domains. To begin with, Nisbett and colleagues (2001) amassed a variety of evidence for the contrast between the holistic mode of thought, which is held to be more common among those engaging in Asian cultures, and the analytic mode of thought, which is held to be more common among those engaging in North American cultures. These culturally divergent cognitive characteristics have been examined with several different measures such as attitude attribution (e.g., Masuda & Kitayama, in press; Miyamoto & Kitayama, 2002), performance in a rod and frame task (Ji, Peng, & Nisbett, 2000; Witkin & Berry, 1975), a Stroop interference effect (Kitayama & Ishii, 2002; Ishii, Reyes, & Kitayama, 2003), and context-dependent memory (Masuda & Nisbett, 2001). These experimental tasks may be usefully classified into two types. Kitayama, Duffy, Kawamura, and Larsen (2003) pointed out that some tasks require ignoring contextual information when making a judgment about a focal object. For example, a judgment about another person may often be tainted by wrong stereotypes associated with a group of which she is a member. In these circumstances, it is necessary to discount any such stereotypes. Such tasks may be called absolute tasks in that the focal judgment must be made in terms that are uninfluenced or unchanged by any contextual information. In these tasks, performance should be better for North Americans than for Asians. Using a rod and frame test (RFT; Witkin & Berry, 1975), Ji and colleagues (2000) recently


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provided evidence for this prediction. Participants were presented with a tilted frame in which a rotating line was placed at the center. The participants' task was to rotate the line so that it was orthogonal to the earth surface (or it was aligned to the direction of gravity) while ignoring the frame. Ji et al. (2000) found that Americans were more accurate in line alignment (hence indicating their superior ability to ignore contextual information) than Chinese. This evidence is noteworthy because the RFT has no obvious social elements. In contrast, some other tasks require incorporating contextual information. For example, a judgment about another person often benefits from attention duly given to the specific social situation in which she behaves. These tasks may be called relative tasks in that the focal judgment must be made in terms that change in accordance with the nature of relevant context. We may expect that Asians with contextual sensitivity would have an advantage. Unlike the evidence for the absolute task, evidence for this prediction comes exclusively from social domains. Thus, it is well known that North Americans often fail to give proper weight to significant contextual information in drawing a judgment about a focal person. This bias, called the fundamental attribution error, is typically substantially weaker in Asian cultures (e.g., Choi & Nisbett, 1998; Masuda & Kitayama, in press; Miyamoto & Kitayama, 2002; Morris & Peng, 1994). In a recent series of cross-cultural experiments, Kitayama, Duffy, Kawamura, and Larsen (2003) addressed the foregoing analysis by developing a new test called the framed line test (FLT). The FLT is specifically designed to assess both the ability to incorporate and the ability to ignore contextual information within a single domain that is arguably nonsocial. Further, within the FLT, this assessment can be made in reference to an objective standard of performance. Specifically, participants are presented with a square frame of varying size, within which is printed a vertical line of varying length. The participants are then shown another square frame of the same or different size and asked to draw a line that is identical to the first line in terms of either absolute length (absolute task) or proportion to the height of the pertinent squares (relative task). In the absolute task, the participants have to ignore both the first frame (when assessing the length of the line) and the second frame (when reproducing the line). Hence, the performance in this task should be better for North Americans than for Asians. In the relative task, the participants have to incorporate the height information of the surrounding frame in both encoding and reproducing the line. Hence, the performance in this task should be better for Asians than for North Americans. Moreover, one major advantage of the FLT is to allow an assessment of the relative ease or difficulty of the two tasks. It was predicted that whereas for Asians, accuracy should be higher for the relative task than for the absolute task, for North Americans the reverse should be the case.

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Figure 7.4 Average amount of errors in the two tasks for Japanese and American (drawn on the basis of the data reported in Kitayama, Duffy, Kawamura, & Larsen, 2003).

Results supported all of these predictions. A typical pattern is illustrated in Figure 7.4. The dependent variable is the average size of error (in mm). As can be seen, for Americans, performance was significantly better in the absolute task than in the relative task. But for Japanese, it was significantly better in the relative task than in the absolute task. Moreover, the performance in the absolute task was significantly better for Americans than for Japanese and, conversely, the performance in the relative task was significantly better for Japanese than for Americans.

Agency implies each individual's ability to regulate one's own action. Although the regulation of action is always referenced to the pertinent action field, the construction of this action field can be quite diverse. In this chapter, we have


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suggested that the action field can be constructed in primary reference to goals, desires, emotions, and needs of the self. In this case, agency resides in personal functions of identifying such personal attributes and using them as referents in regulating one's own action. Action therefore often takes the form of influencing others in accordance with one's own desires and needs. This style of agency, called the independent agency, is quite dominant and widespread in European-American middle-class cultures. In contrast, the action field can also be constructed in reference not only to desires and needs of the self, but also to expectations, evaluations, and other thoughts attributed to relevant others in a relationship. In this case, agency depends critically on interpersonal functions of inferring thoughts of others in a relationship and using them in regulating one's own actions. Action therefore often takes the form of adjusting to others in accordance with the expectations and other thoughts attributed to the others. This style of agency, called the interdependent agency, is quite dominant in East Asian cultures. The respective forms of agency are widely shared within a given cultural group. As a consequence, while individuals organize their own actions in one particular scheme, they also anticipate others in their own culture to do the same. Moreover, this anticipation will, for the most part, be fulfilled. Hence, there will be a sense of flow in social interaction. In this way, the disparate schemes of agency become socially validated and authenticated and, thus, taken for granted within that cultural context (Berger & Luckmann, 1967; Giddens, 1984; Schutz & Luckmann, 1974). They come to be experienced as "natural" within that context. Only when cultures crash will the hidden presumptions of each culture be brought to the foreground, producing a degree of embarrassment and even intercultural antagonism. It is important to reiterate that when seen from different perspectives, both forms of agency would appear somewhat strange and suboptimaJ. To begin with, from the European-American, independent perspective, the extent to which interdependent agencies incorporate external information such as interpersonal expectations and social norms into one's own action system might appear excessive and, thus, conforming or ingratiating. Likewise, from the Asian, interdependent perspective, the extent to which independent agencies focus exclusively on one's own desires and needs might appear excessive and, thus, egoistic and self-centered. We hope that the arguments presented in this chapter, along with empirical evidence for them, have made it clear that neither of the perspectives is fully natural, objective, or more inherent in the human nature. Instead, the both perspectives are social constructions that have been put forward and held in place within different cultural regions and traditions. Human actions cannot be understood without some perspective or cognitive framework for the understanding. Nevertheless, it is quite difficult to simultaneously use multiple perspectives (Shweder, 2003). This difficulty is

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especially problematic when we seek to understand behaviors of people outside of our own cultural groups (Geertz, 1973). Hence, in the history of modern, western social psychology, interdependent behaviors of adjustment and altruism, which can often be regarded positively, have nonetheless been construed in negative terms such conformity and obedience (Markus & Kitayama, 1994). Moreover, in this literature there has been a strong tendency to reduce interpersonal dynamics to rational weighing of individual utilities. For example, helping someone is often conceptualized as caused by implicit calculation of positive utilities that behavior might produce for the self (e.g., Cialdini & Kenrick, 1976). Although such a mechanism might operate in some cases, an alternative mechanism of spontaneous adjustment to others' needs and desires might also be at work (Batson, Duncan, Ackerman, Buckley, & Birch, 1981). The main thrust of the present chapter is that there will be a systematic cross-cultural variation in which of the mechanisms is more likely to be brought on-line and implicated in the production of the seemingly identical behavior. Whereas mechanisms based on individual and personal utilities might be more dominant in European-American independent cultural contexts, those based on interpersonal attunement and consequent adjustment might be more dominant in Asian interdependent cultural contexts. There are many possible directions for future work. Three of them deserve a mention. First, the systematic experimental inquiry of the kind reviewed in this chapter is limited largely to West-East comparisons. Moreover, by West researchers often simply mean North America and by East they mean some limited number of Asian countries such as Japan, Korea, and China. Much more effort is required to expand the data base of socio-cultural psychology. This involves new research initiatives in countries and areas where little or no systematic work has been conducted such as middle-east, Africa, Eastern Europe, and South America. Moreover, as we shall see shortly, it is important to look closely into regional variations within any given large cultural areas. Second, more effort to explore sociohistorical underpinnings of the divergent modes of agency discussed in the present chapter is justified. Indeed, this effort might shed new light on regional variation in psychological processes and tendencies. For example, it might seem plausible that one significant factor that breeds American individualism stems from the fact that the United States and Canada were created through a constant flow of voluntary immigrants who settled in this "land of opportunity." To the extent that the economically motivated voluntary settlement encourages an extreme form of individualism and independent agency, one might be able to isolate a "pocket of individualism" even within a larger culture of very different ethos. Such a pocket will be identified where there is a relatively recent and continuous flow of voluntary immigrants who are motivated by economic opportunities. Drawing on this line of reasoning, Kitayama and Ishii (2003) have argued with initial evidence that a northern island of Japan—Hokkaido—qualifies as such a pocket.


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The third significant line of research may focus on socialization processes through which the culturally contingent forms of agency are established. A number of recent studies have explored different aspects of socialization practices that might be implicated in the construction of agency (e.g., Rothbaum, Pott, Azuma, Miyake, & Weisz, 2000). Yet, at present very little is known about the specific time course of this development. How early, for example, in the development of a child can we find evidence for the culturally contingent forms of agency? Which aspects of the environment, say, caregivers (e.g., Tobin, Wu, & Davidson, 1989), discourse patterns (e.g., Lucy & Gaskins, 2000), or patterns of social relations (e.g., Rothbaum et al., 2002) should we look into for a clue for this development? Kitayama and Duffy (2004) argue, for example, that discourse patterns in early socialization establish certain culture-specific attentional bias, which in turn channels the way in which cognitive and behavioral styles in more social domains are nurtured. At present, however, many other hypotheses are equally plausible and, only through further empirical inquiry into the social development of culture-contingent cognitive, emotional and motivational characteristics will we be able to get a solid theoretical understanding about these fundamental questions about the human psychological development. In conclusion, the evidence summarized in this chapter makes a good case for the cultural construction of some significant elements of human agency such as motivation, emotion, and cognition. Substantially, this emerging literature highlights the crucial role of socioculturally constructed environments in shaping the human psychological systems for action. Methodologically, it encourages further effort toward an examination of on-line psychological processes (as opposed to each person's reflections or judgments about them). Together, the present evidence calls for more thorough empirical investigations into the fundamentally social nature of human agency. References Aronson, E. (1968). Dissonance theory: Progress and problems. In R. P. Abelson, E. Aronson, W. J. McGuire, T. M. Newcomb, M. J. Rosenberg, & P. H. Tannenbaum (Eds.), Theories of cognitive consistency: A sourcebook. Chicago: Rand McNally. Bandura, A. (1989). Self-regulation of motivation and action through internal standards and goal systems. In L. A. Pervin (Ed.), Goal concepts in personality and social psychology (pp. 19-85). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Batson, C. D., Duncan, B. D., Ackerman, P., Buckley, T., & Birch, K. (1981). Is empathic emotion a source of altruistic motivation? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 40, 290-302. Bellah, R. N., Madsen, R., Sullivan, W. M., Swidler, A., & Tipton, S. M. (1985). Habits of the heart: Individualism and commitment in American life. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

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Schutz, A., & Luckmann, T. (1974). The structure of the life-world (R. M. Zaner & H. T. Engelhart, Trans.). London: Heinemann. Shweder, R. A. (2003). Why do men barbecue: Recipes for cultural psychology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Shweder, R. A., & Bourne, E. J. (1984). Does the concept of the person vary cross-culturally? In R. A. Shweder & R. A. LeVine (Eds.), Culture theory: Essays on mind, self, and emotion (pp. 158-199). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Singelis, T. M. (1994). The measurement of independent and interdependent self-construals. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 20, 580-591. Steele, C. M. (1988). The psychology of self-affirmation: Sustaining the integrity of the self. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol 21, pp. 181-227). San Diego, CA: Academic Press. Stone, J., & Cooper, J. (2001). A self-standards model of cognitive dissonance. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. 37, 228-243. Tobin, J. J., Wu, D. Y. H., & Davidson, D. H. (1989). Preschool in three cultures: Japan, China, and the United States. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Triandis, H. C. (1989). The self and social behavior in differing cultural-contexts. Psychological Review, 96, 506-520. Uchida, Y., Kitayama, S., Mesquita, B., Reyes, J. A., & Morling, B. (2003). Culturally contingent correlates of wellbeing and happiness: Self-esteem and social support. Unpublished Manuscript. University of Michigan. Uchida, Y., Norasakkunkit, V., & Kitayama, S. (in press). Cultural constructions ofhappiness: Theory and evidence. Journal of Happiness Studies. Vallacher, R. R., & Wegner, D. M. (1987). What do people think they're doing? Action identification and human behavior. Psychological Review, 94, 3-15. Weisz, J. R., Rothbaum, F. M., & Blackburn, T. C. (1984). Standing out and standing in: The psychology of control in America and Japan. American Psychologist, 39, 955-969. Witkin, H. A., & Berry, J. W. (1975). Psychological differentiation in cross-cultural perspective. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, (6, 4-87. Yang, K. S. (1986). Chinese personality and its change: In M. H. Bond (Ed.), The psychology of the Chinese people (pp. 106-170). New York: Oxford University Press.

Chapter 8

Language, Culture, and Conceptions of the Self Wei Qi Elaine Perunovic, Michael Ross and Anne E. Wilson University of Waterloo

A colleague of ours recalls a conversation about her research with the famous Israeli psychologist, the late Amos Tversky. The two of them discussed her research at length, first in Hebrew and then later switching into English. Tversky's comments were more confrontational than one might typically expect in an American academic context. Interestingly, Tversky recognized this too, pausing during the English part of the conversation to observe aloud that he would have been far less critical of the research had they begun the discussion in English rather than Hebrew. This anecdote is consistent with the viewpoint expressed in this chapter: The behavior and thought of bilingual individuals are influenced by the language they use. Language matters because it is "not simply a way of communicating, like the telephone or postal system. A language is a way of thinking. It's a way of being, a way of life" (Basilieres, 2003, pp. 137-138). This quote comes from a novelist with a French Canadian mother and an English Canadian father, a person who is a member of two distinct cultural and linguistic groups. Psychologists Marian and Neisser (2000) make a similar point: "Using a given language does not merely involve uttering certain words; it creates a general mindset, a way of thinking that is different from the mindset that would go with a different language" (p. 365). Although these quotes may seem to echo the generally discredited Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that language directly causes thought (Whorf, 1956), such direct causation is not what we have in mind. When people learn culturally shared ways of thinking about themselves and the world, their learning is encoded in, and linked to, a particular language. Subsequent use of this language should activate associated cultural constructs. In particular, use of one's original language should provide a more powerful source of activation of these cultural constructs than

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would use of a second language acquired later in life. In contrast, if a second language were learned in the context of a new culture, then speaking that language should activate aspects of this new cultural perspective. Different languages can make salient different information structures and memories, which in turn influence cognition (Hardin & Banaji, 1993; Marian & Neisser, 2000).

Immigration and the Conception of Self In the current chapter, we focus on immigrants to Canada from Chinese-speaking countries in East Asia. These immigrants are bicultural and bilingual not through birth, but through education and migration. Although Chinese immigrants (especially those from Hong Kong) often have some exposure to English and to Western culture prior to moving to Canada, they primarily learn cultures and languages consecutively, with each successive culture most strongly linked to its associated language. We examine whether language influences how bicultural Chinese immigrants think about and evaluate themselves. Our main reason for studying East-Asian immigrants is to understand how they deal with the conflicting representations of self in Western and East-Asian cultures. Prior to coming to Canada, many of these immigrants acquired characteristically East-Asian ways of construing themselves and their world. Relative to North Americans, East Asians are typically more self-critical. East Asians report lower self-esteem on standard Western measures of self-esteem (Kitayama, Markus, & Lieberman, 1995; Heine, Lehman, Markus, & Kitayama, 1999) and describe themselves in a less flattering manner in open-ended self-descriptions, in which they report fewer positive and more negative self-statements than North Americans (e.g., Bond & Cheung, 1983; Kanagawa, Cross, & Markus, 2001; Wang, 2001). As well, East Asians are more inclined than Westerners to form an interdependent self, which includes social roles and other people, (e.g., Ip & Bond, 1995; Markus, Mullally, & Kitayama, 1997; Triandis, McCusker, & Hui, 1990; Wang, 2001), and more likely to describe their behaviors as prompted by external contextual factors rather than by their own internal dispositions such as personality traits, preferences, and goals (e.g., Cousins, 1989). Research by developmental psychologists on parent-child interaction suggests that these cultural differences in the conception of self can be traced to divergent socialization practices in the two cultures (e.g., Miller, Wiley, Fung, & Liang, 1997; Wang, 2001; Wang, Leichtman, & Davies, 2000). The discrepancy between East-Asian and Western self-assessments extends to the domain of emotion. Emotional moderation is more valued in Chinese than in the North American culture (Russell & Yik, 1996). The emphasis on moderation may stem from the Confucian philosophy adopted by many East-Asian cultures, which stresses the importance of balance. There is some research evidence consistent with the premise that East Asians report a more

8. Language, Culture

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balanced emotional experience than do North Americans. In a study in which American and Japanese students reported retrospectively on the frequency with which they experienced various emotions, Markus and Kitayama (1994) found that Americans reported many more positive than negative emotions, but that Japanese reported about the same number of positive and negative emotions. How does the experience of moving from East Asia to Canada, learning a new language,1 and acquiring new knowledge about a culture affect how immigrants come to think about themselves? As they become acquainted with nonimmigrant individuals and more familiar with the Western environment, they learn cultural beliefs and values that are somewhat distinct from their original cultural views. In English Canada, such cultural learning occurs primarily in English, rather than Chinese. As a result, the use of Chinese is especially linked to East-Asian cultural beliefs, and the use of English to Canadian cultural beliefs. Over time, immigrants adopt a new Western cultural perspective, which can influence their feelings and cognitions. The factors affecting the pace of assimilation to a new culture are not fully understood: Does assimilation simply take time, or do goals and context matter? Heine et al. (1999) found that length of time in North America was significantly related to the self-esteem of individuals of Japanese background. Comparing Japanese with no Western exposure to Japanese varying in familiarity with North America (up to 3rd generation Japanese-Canadians), Heine et al. found that the longer participants or their ancestors had lived in North America, the higher participants' self-esteem. However, over the shorter term in an immigrant's experience, there may be factors more important than the number of months and years living in Canada. During their acculturation process, immigrants typically do not discard one identity as they internalize the other (LaFromboise, Coleman, & Gerton, 1993). Immigrants often function and socialize in a bicultural world. Even as they increasingly integrate with Western friends and colleagues, they continue to mingle with family and friends from their culture of origin and engage in activities that preserve their identification with East-Asian culture. Chinese immigrants vary in the degree to which they choose to maintain links to their original culture, independent of the time spent in Canada. For instance, some individuals opt to associate mainly with Chinese friends and to speak Chinese whenever possible, whereas others gravitate more toward Western friends and activities. McTeer (2002) found that among Chinese-born students who had lived in Canada for between four and 13 years, number of years in Canada did not predict identification with Canadian or Chinese culture, level of self-esteem, or affect. In contrast, individual differences in cultural immersion (as measured by language use) appeared to play an important role. McTeer (2002) asked participants to report the amount of time that they spent speaking English versus Chinese on a daily basis. Chinese-born students reported speaking English from 5% to 99.9% of the time. Those who spent more than 50% of their time speaking English

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reported more identification with Canadian culture relative to Chinese culture, higher self-esteem, and more positive relative to negative affect, when length of time in Canada was statistically controlled. What happens to East-Asian immigrants' conceptions of self as they adopt more Western views? Do they possess two conflicting self-representations, a Western and Eastern version, with each representation evoked by its associated cultural context? Does the Western self emerge in Western cultural contexts and when English is spoken, unencumbered by any of the preconceptions of the East-Asian self? Does the East-Asian self emerge in Chinese cultural contexts and when Chinese is spoken, unaffected by Western cultural assumptions? Is there some blending of the two selves, so that an individual is to some extent both Western and Eastern in all contexts? Or do the contrasting self-conceptions conflict, so that an individual is either uncertain or oscillates between the two perspectives even within the same cultural context? We speculated that many East-Asian immigrants possess two largely autonomous representations of self and that the accessibility of each selfrepresentation depends on context and language. Western self-concepts are activated and East-Asian self-concepts are inhibited in Western cultural contexts and when English is in use. East-Asian self-concepts are activated and Western self-concepts are inhibited in East-Asian cultural contexts and when Mandarin or Cantonese are spoken. Our reasoning is consistent with a longstanding psychological belief that individuals are different people in different social contexts and that their momentary self-views reflect currently accessible self-knowledge (James, 1950; Markus & Nurius, 1986; McGuire & Padawer-Singer, 1976; Mischel, 1968; Nurius & Markus, 1990). James related the experience of self to the people in one's surroundings, famously noting that there are "as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him and carry an image of him" (p. 294). Nurius and Markus (1990) demonstrated the influence of context cues on self-concept, by asking individuals to imagine themselves in different social situations, for example moving to a new city for a job. The imagined context influenced participants' subsequent self-evaluations. In short, everyone, notjust an East-Asian immigrant, has different and even conflicting self-representations that are evoked by varying contextual and social cues. Although individuals' self-representations might differ in various contexts (for instance, a Canadian woman might use quite different attributes to describe her "home self' and her "work self), for monocultural individuals it is unlikely that this shift in context will elicit a fundamental change in how they understand themselves and their social world. What is unique about immigrants is that they may possess not only different self-concepts, but two conflicting self-systems, with each system bound to a specific culture and language. Each system guides people's understanding, affect, judgments, and behavior. As a


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result, differing cultural contexts and languages might activate an entire system of understanding, resulting in dramatic changes in people's self-understanding, emotions, decisions, and actions.

Shifting Cultural Frames and Social Judgment Although language may be a powerful determinant of cultural activation, it is not the only determinant. In an elegant series of studies reported by Hong, Morris, Chiu, and Benet-Martinez (2000), bicultural individuals changed the cultural frame through which they view the world in response to cues in their surroundings. Hong et al. (2000) reviewed studies in which Hong Kong Chinese students were presented with symbols of either the West (e.g., a picture of the U.S. flag) or East Asia (e.g., a picture of the Great Wall). Next, the students read a scenario in which a person (or animal) behaved in a certain fashion and the students were asked to explain the actions of the hypothetical characters.2 Participants initially exposed to Western cultural icons were more likely to attribute a target's behavior to internal dispositions than were participants primed with Chinese cultural icons. This pattern of results parallels findings from cross-cultural research. Relative to East Asians, North Americans are more inclined to explain a target's actions in terms of internal characteristics (e.g., Morris & Peng, 1994). The experimental approach of Hong and her colleagues has several methodological advantages over traditional cross-cultural research that contrasts groups of people who live in different countries. Most of the cross-cultural research conducted by social psychologists has relied on samples of students selected from universities in East-Asian and North American countries. Although the results are interesting and informative, the samples from the different countries might differ systematically on dimensions that are not directly related to culture. Discrepancies in socioeconomic status, as well as divergent academic standards, expectations, and competitiveness could contribute to some of the differences obtained between the two groups. A major methodological benefit of using bicultural individuals to test cultural hypotheses is that it permits the random assignment of participants to experimental conditions. Participants in the various experimental conditions should be highly comparable on all background characteristics, differing only on the cultural perspective elicited by the experimental procedure.

Language, Cultural Context, and Conceptions of Self Next, we turn to research that uses language to activate specific cultural frames. In these studies, bilingual biculturals are randomly assigned to complete the experiment in one language or another. Therefore, the experimentally created

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groups differ only on a single, experimentally controlled, dimension. Although few in number, previous studies of bicultural individuals tend to support the idea that different languages might activate different cultural systems, thereby affecting the speaker's current self-representation. Hong Kong bilinguals were more likely to endorse Eastern values (Bond, 1983) and obtain higher scores on a dogmatism scale (Earle, 1969) when they responded in Chinese rather than English. In explaining the dogmatism findings, Earle suggested that Hong Kong bilinguals acquired two distinctive structured belief systems that were associated with the two language cultures. Presumably, the Chinese language activated the more dogmatic Chinese language culture, whereas English activated the less dogmatic English culture (Krauss & Chiu, 1998). Sussman and Rosenfeld (1982) reported that Venezuelans more closely approximated American conversational distance when speaking English rather than their native language, suggesting that use of each language elicited behaviors characteristic of its associated culture. Trafimow, Silverman, Fan, and Law (1997) examined the English and Chinese language responses of bilingual Hong Kong students to the Twenty Statements Test (TST). In the TST, participants repeatedly answer the question "Who am I?" by completing 20 sentences beginning with "I am ..." Trafimow and his associates found that their bilingual participants generated more personal traits and fewer social roles or group memberships when answering the TST in English rather than in Chinese. Finally, in a study of autobiographical memory, Marian and Neisser (2000) reported that immigrants to the United States from Russia recalled more episodes from the Russian-speaking times of their lives when responding in Russian and more events from the English-speaking times of their lives when responding in English. In all of these studies, language seems to activate associated knowledge structures. We found only one published exception to this rule. Bond and Yang (1982) reported that Hong Kong bilinguals endorsed East-Asian values to a greater extent when they answered in English rather than Chinese. We consider the implications of this finding further after discussing our own study (Ross, Xun, & Wilson, 2002). Our study of language and self builds on past research and extends it in several ways. We included a group of Chinese-born bicultural students attending a Canadian university, as well as groups of Canadian-bora students of Chinese ethnicity (Canadian-born Chinese) and Canadian-born students of European ethnicity (European-Canadians). All participants completed a number of self-assessment measures. We selected measures on which past researchers detected cultural differences between students in East Asia and students in North America. Chinese-bom participants were randomly assigned to complete these measures in either Chinese or English. In our samples, few Canadian-bora Chinese could speak and write the Chinese language fluently. Therefore, both


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European-Canadians and Canadian-bora Chinese completed the measures in English only. Our goal was to show not only that language matters, but to examine how much it matters. We reasoned that if East-Asian and Western identities are stored in separate systems (Trafimow et al., 1997; Hong et al., 2000), then Chinese-bora participants writing in English and Canadian-bora participants of Chinese ethnicity should exhibit self-perceptions similar to those of European-Canadians. But is it also conceivable that culture would continue to influence responding to some degree, regardless of language? If so, the self-assessments of Chinese-bora participants responding in either language should differ significantly from those of European-Canadians. Finally, where would Canadian-bom Chinese fall on the West-East Asia self-assessment spectrum? To the extent that English activates a Western identity in Canadian-bora Chinese, their self-assessments should closely approximate those provided by European-Canadians. Our study did not allow us to assess the degree to which Canadian-bora Chinese possess multiple identities, because we did not manipulate cultural cues for this group. We included an open-ended self-description measure as well as structured measures in the questionnaire. Although some past researchers have included structured scales (e.g., Heine et al., 1999) and others have used open-ended measures (e.g., Kanagawa et al., 2001), few have incorporated both. Each of the methods has drawbacks: The meaning of structured scale items might be transformed by the process of translation. Individuals' open-ended responses could be influenced by the common vocabulary and way of expression found in each language (e.g., if English contains more commonly used personal attributes and Chinese contains more commonly used collective attributes, the word frequency in the two languages could be reflected in respondents' personal self-descriptions). However, if comparable results are obtained on both types of measures in a single study, we can be more confident about the findings. For the open-ended measure, we asked participants to describe themselves as a person using their own words and providing whatever information they wished. We used this open-ended self-description instead of the commonly used TST to encourage participants to write more freely and elaborately about themselves. We also chose this format because of the different grammatical structure of English and Chinese. In English, "I am...," as used in the TST, is likely to be followed by an adjective or trait term (e.g., I am friendly, nice, etc.). In Chinese, an adjective or trait term is more likely to follow "I," and a noun is more likely to follow "I am" (Chao, 1968). It is possible that this grammatical difference between the two languages partially explains the findings of previous cross-cultural research in which Chinese responded with fewer trait terms on the TST than did North Americans. By asking participants to write about themselves freely, we sought to eliminate this alternative interpretation of the findings.

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After writing the self-description, participants completed the Rosenberg self-esteem scale (Rosenberg, 1965). Next, they assessed the extent to which they were currently experiencing a variety of positive (strong, relaxed, content, inspired, hopeful, enthusiastic, proud, confident, and happy) and negative emotions (irritable, upset, angry, worried, distressed, nervous, scared, hostile, ashamed, afraid, guilty, alone, and sad). Finally, participants indicated their agreement with a series of statements that reflected traditional East-Asian self-views (e.g., "You should not feel good about your own achievements, because there are many others who have achieved higher than you have."). These structured questionnaires were translated into Chinese in the Chinese language condition. We included only emotion terms that our translators judged to have equivalent meanings in Chinese and English. The major findings from the study are reported in Table 8.1. First consider contrasts between the two Chinese-born groups who completed the experiment in either Chinese or English. These two groups of individuals were highly comparable. In both groups, participants were born outside of Canada in a Chinese culture, could still speak, read, and write either Cantonese or Mandarin, and had lived in Canada equivalent amounts of time, on average. Despite their similarities, these two groups of biculturals provided systematically divergent responses. Relative to Chinese-born participants responding in English, Chinese-born participants answering in Chinese reported more characteristically East-Asian self-representations and evaluations. Participants answering in Chinese made more references to others in their self-descriptions, and reported fewer private self-statements and more collective self-statements. The private self-statements of participants writing in Chinese were less self-enhancing than the private self-statements of Chinese-born participants writing in English. We found the same tendency on the closed-ended measures for Chinese-born participants writing in Chinese to answer in a more East-Asian fashion. Compared to Chinese-born participants responding in English, those responding in Chinese reported lower self-esteem and greater agreement with traditional Chinese self-views. On the emotion measure, participants responding in Chinese reported experiencing comparable levels of positive and negative affect. In contrast, those responding in English reported experiencing considerably more positive than negative affect. Our study revealed few effects of culture, independent of language. When writing in English, Chinese-born participants differed from the European-Canadians on only one dimension: They reported greater agreement with statements depicting Chinese views of the self. The finding that culture of origin had such a minor impact on self-descriptions supports the hypothesis that East-Asian and Western identities are stored in separate knowledge systems (Hong


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Table 8.1 Dependent Variables by Condition (Ross et al., 2002)

Dependent Variable Endorse Chinese Views References to others Private Statements Collective Statements Self-esteem Positive Affect Negative Affect

Condition 3

1

2

7.33. 7.43. 6.78a 4.83a 5.56a 3.35a 3.02a

5.60b 5.21b 8.76ab 2.10b 6.68b 3.95a 2.25ab

5.12 bc 3.93b 9-85ab 2-52b 6.73b 3.85a 2.17b

4 4.59C 4.66b 10.13b 1.88b 6.63b 4.17a. 2.32ab

Note. 1 = Chinese-born responding in Chinese. 2 = Chinese-born responding in English. 3 = Canadian-born, Chinese ethnicity responding in English. 4 = Canadian-born, European ethnicity responding in English. Higher numbers indicate greater endorsement of Chinese views, more references to others, more private and collective statements, higher self-esteem and positive or negative affect. Within a row, entries with different subscripts are significantly different from each other.

et al., 2000; Trafimow et al., 1997) in bicultural individuals, with each system activated by its associated language. Interestingly, we failed to detect a single significant difference between Canadian-born Chinese and European-Canadian participants. As Canadian-born Chinese responded only in English, we cannot determine whether they lacked Chinese cultural beliefs and knowledge, or whether these constructs were simply not activated. We could not use language as means of activation because these participants reported little fluency in Chinese. It is possible that we could have activated these individual's Chinese identity through means (e.g., Chinese cultural icons, exposure to Chinese significant others, etc.) other than language.

The Association Between Positive and Negative Affect There is an aspect of emotional experience that we did not directly examine in the analyses reported in Ross et al. (2002). In the West, positive and negative affect are generally regarded as antithetical experiences. For example, Westerners suppose that sadness decreases as happiness increases. It is possible, of course, for a North American to imagine that a person could feel both extremely happy and sad at the same time. For example, a woman might be delighted that she is graduating from university and at the same time be sad at the prospect of being separated from her college friends. However, North Americans probably expect such occasions to be rare. Research tends to support the idea that positive and negative affect are inversely related in Western respondents. For instance,

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Kitayama, Markus, and Kurokawa (2000) asked students in America how frequently they experienced various positive and negative emotional states. The correlation was negative between the frequency of positive and negative emotions recalled. In the dialectical thinking evident among East Asians, opposites are not contradictory (Peng & Nibett, 1999, 2000). From this dialectical perspective, affective experiences such as happy and sad might be typically unrelated or even positively associated. Research supports this position. Kitayamaet al. (2000) asked students in Japan to report how frequently they had experienced various positive and negative emotional states. Although the correlations between retrospective reports of the frequency of various positive and negative emotions were largely negative among American participants, they were mostly positive among Japanese participants. In another study of the retrospective reporting of emotion conducted in 38 different countries, Schimmack, Oishi, and Diener (2002) found that the inverse association between negative and positive emotions was weakest in Asian cultures. Bagozzi, Wong, and Yi (1999) observed similar cultural differences in reports of the intensity of current emotions. The association between positive and negative emotions in China and Korea was generally less negative than it was in the United States. Our re-analysis of the affect data reported by Ross et al. (2002) indicates that the strength and direction of the association between positive and negative emotions varied across experimental groups (Table 8.2). In assessing their current emotional states, European-Canadians and Canadian-born Chinese displayed a typically Western pattern of responding: Their reports of positive and negative affect were inversely related. Among Chinese-born participants, however, the nature of the association between positive and negative affect tended to depend on language. When the response language was Chinese, the negative correlation between positive and negative emotions disappeared. The sample size within each group is relatively low and the findings should only be considered suggestive. It is intriguing, however, that the pattern of results so closely resembles findings

Table 8.2 Relation Between Positive and Negative Affect Chinese-born Canadian (Chinese) .25 (N = 23) *p < .10. **p

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